The Conscription Conflict and the Great War 9781925377231, 9781925377224

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The Conscription Conflict and the Great War

Edited by Robin Archer, Joy Damousi, Murray Goot and Sean Scalmer

© Copyright 2016 © Copyright of this collection in its entirety is held by the editors, Robin Archer, Joy Damousi, Murray Goot and Sean Scalmer. © Copyright of the individual chapters is held by the respective authors. All rights reserved. Apart from any uses permitted by Australia’s Copyright Act 1968, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without prior written permission from the copyright owners. Inquiries should be directed to the publisher. Monash University Publishing Matheson Library and Information Services Building 40 Exhibition Walk Monash University Clayton, Victoria 3800, Australia www.publishing.monash.edu Monash University Publishing brings to the world publications which advance the best traditions of humane and enlightened thought. Monash University Publishing titles pass through a rigorous process of independent peer review. www.publishing.monash.edu/books/ccgw-9781925377224.html Series: Australian History Series Editor: Sean Scalmer Design: Les Thomas Cover image: The prime minister The Right Honourable W M Hughes, speaking in Martin Place, Sydney, c. 1916. Courtesy: Australian War Memorial AO3376. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Title: The conscription conflict and the Great War / Robin Archer, Joy Damousi, Murray Goot, Sean Scalmer, editors. ISBN: 9781925495393 (paperback) Subjects: World War, 1914-1918--Australia--History Draft--Australia--Public opinion. Draft--Australia--History. Australia--Military policy--20th century. Other Creators/Contributors: Archer, Robin, editor. Damousi, Joy, 1961- editor. Goot, Murray, editor. Scalmer, Sean, editor. Dewey Number: 355.223630994 Printed in Australia by Griffin Press an Accredited ISO AS/NZS 14001:2004 Environmental Management System printer. The paper this book is printed on is certified against the Forest Stewardship Council ® Standards. Griffin Press holds FSC chain of custody certification SGS-COC-005088. FSC promotes environmentally responsible, socially beneficial and economically viable management of the world’s forests.

C ON T E N T S Introduction

‘The Most Interesting Experiment that has Ever Been Made in a Political Democracy’: Conscription and the Great War. . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Robin Archer and Sean Scalmer Part 1: Origins. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Chapter One

‘A Real Heritage of the English People’: British Liberalism and ‘Continental Despotism’. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Douglas Newton Chapter Two

Labour and Liberty: The Origins of the Conscription Referendum. . . . 37 Robin Archer Part 2: Campaigns and R esults. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 Chapter Three

Anti-Conscriptionism in Australia: Individuals, Organisations and Arguments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 Frank Bongiorno Chapter Four

Universities and Conscription: The ‘Yes’ Campaigns and the University of Melbourne. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 Joy Damousi

Chapter Five

The Results of the 1916 and 1917 Conscription Referendums Re-examined. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 Murray Goot Part 3: C omparisons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 Chapter Six

Why Was it Easier to Introduce and Implement Conscription in Some English-speaking Countries than in Others?. . . . . . . . . . . . 148 John Connor Chapter Seven

Conscription in the First World War: Britain and Australia . . . . . . . 169 Ross McKibbin Part 4: Legacies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187 Chapter Eight

Legend and Lamentation: Remembering the Anti-Conscription Struggle. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188 Sean Scalmer

Notes on Contributors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211 Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212

Int rodu ction

‘ T H E MO S T I N T ER E S T I NG E X PER I M E N T T H AT H A S EV ER BE E N M A DE I N A P OL I T ICA L DE MO CR AC Y ’ Conscription and the Great War Robin Archer and Sean Scalmer

The First World War is the subject of great popular and scholarly interest. Much of that interest has been concerned with the sacrifice and heroism of soldiers – a trend that seems to have been reinforced during the commemorations of the War’s centenary. The War is widely viewed as a catastrophic development that cast a long, malign shadow. Its formative influence over the twentieth century is generally acknowledged. Yet there has been relatively little recent debate about political and social conflicts with­ in the belligerent countries. And while the centenary has generated much discussion about those who fought the war, those who sought to prevent it or contain its effects have received far less attention. In all the belligerent countries, efforts to prevent the war were quickly overwhelmed. But in Australia, alone among the combatants, a subsequent movement to prevent the introduction of conscription met with success. On two occasions – on 28 October 1916 and on 20 December 1917 – the gov­ ernment held a referendum in order to introduce conscription. Each time the proposal was narrowly rejected. Simply seeking the consent of citizens in this way was quite unique. That they should answer ‘No’ amidst the wartime emotions and censorship of the period is more striking still. –1–

T he Conscription Conflict and the Great War

The conscription conflict was a defining feature of wartime Australia. It was certainly a bitter and intense political conflict. Indeed many commen­ tators – both contemporary observers and subsequent scholars – have argued that it was the most bitter and intense conflict ever to take place in Australia. To the advocates of conscription, its opponents were disloyal free riders, forsaking their country and Empire. To the opponents of conscription, its advocates were threatening Australia’s most precious institutions and values. Each thought the other threatened their fellow countrymen with death. Each thought that the other, whether consciously or not, was doing the work of the Prussian enemy. And in their heated propaganda, each portrayed the other as a murderous traitor.1 Writing privately on the eve of the first referendum to ex-Prime Minister Andrew Fisher (who had left in ill-health a year earlier to become Australia’s High Commissioner in London), his successor, William Morris Hughes, judged the conflict to be ‘the most severe and the most bitter that Australia has ever known’. In a similar letter after the referendum, Hughes’ successor as Labor party leader, Frank Tudor, who was the first to resign from the cabinet over the issue, concurred that it was the ‘hardest fought campaign’ he had ever been involved in. And an old friend of Fisher’s wrote simply that ‘it has been a sort of civil war’.2 This remained the judgment of key participants long after the event, de­spite the Cold War tensions, the subsequent splits, and all that had happened since. Writing on the fiftieth anniversary of the conflict, E.J. Holloway – a pivotal trade union and Labor Party leader during the conscription conflict, and later an influential federal minister during and after the Second World War – still felt that the conscription con­fl ict was ‘the greatest and most bitter battle’ in the Victorian labour move­ ment’s his­tory. 3 And now, a century later, it remains the judgment of many scholars that the conscription issue gave rise to ‘a public debate that has

1 2 3

See, for example, images 2, 3, 4, 5, 12 and 16. See Andrew Fisher papers, National Library of Australia (NLA) MS 2919/1/251 (26 October 1916) for Hughes, MS 2919/1/280 (27 November 1916) for Tudor, and MS 2919/1/286 (25 December 1916) for his friend W.H. Demaine. See E.J. Holloway, The Australian Victory over Conscription in 1916–17 (Melbourne: Anti-Conscription Jubilee Committee, 1966), 3–4, 19. See also F.B. Smith, The Conscription Plebiscites in Australia, 1916–17 (Melbourne: Victorian Historical Association, 1965), 10 and Leslie C. Jauncey, The Story of Conscription in Australia (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1935), ix.

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Introduction

never been rivaled in Australian political history for its bitterness, division and violence’.4 Commemorations often claim a certain uniqueness for Australia’s exper­ iences in the First World War. Comradeship in the trenches, for example, is often characterised as a distinctively Australian form of ‘mateship’, although this was an idea that had previously been largely associated with the labour movement and working-class solidarity. But in truth, similar kinds of soldierly comradeship were experienced in many of the belligerents – enemies included. In Vienna, even an enduring opponent of the war, like the writer Stefan Zweig, noticed, from the outset, the appeal exerted by the social egalitarianism fos­tered by military service. And in Germany, the sociologist Emil Lederer observed in 1915 how the experience of military service undermined distinctions of social class, an experience which was said to have produced a new kind of sol­idar­ity – a community of the trenches – in which class differences ceased to exist.5 The conscription conflict is rarely discussed as a distinctively Australian experience. And yet by any standard it really was unique. Indeed it was quite without precedent − not just in Australia, but anywhere in the world. In other countries, it was immediately recognised as a remarkable event and attracted sustained attention. In the United States, still neutral and without wartime censorship in 1916, the referendum generated enormous interest. Major news­papers covered it in detail and the outcome was reported in scores of newspapers – large and small – across the country. The level of interest was all the more remarkable as the referendum coincided with the final days of a US Presidential election campaign and an intense focus on its outcome. There was also extensive coverage of the referendum in the labour, progressive and socialist press. Commentators were particularly struck by the extraordinary nature of the referendum. ‘In only one country has there been a genuine test vote upon military conscription and to the everlasting credit of self-governing Australia the proposal was rejected …’ wrote the editor of the Coast Seamen’s Journal. ‘Modern history knows no other election like this’, reported the New York Call. The Intercollegiate Socialist thought it was ‘probably the most

4 5

Joan Beaumont, Broken Nation: Australians and the Great War (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2013), 223. Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday (London: Pushkin Press, 2009), 246; Emil Lederer, ‘Zur Soziologie des Weltkrieges’, Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Politik, 39 (1915), 350; and V.R. Berghahn, Militarism: The History of an International Debate 1861–1979 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 34.

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T he Conscription Conflict and the Great War

interesting experiment that has ever been made in a political democracy’.6 Most saw the result as offering lessons for democracies in general and the United States in particular.7 At the beginning of the war, attitudes to conscription in most of the countries involved differed markedly from those in the historically liberal English-speaking world. For many in Britain, conscription had long been an anathema. Its presence was treated as one of the defining characteristics of continental despotism and its absence as part of the heritage of British liberalism. None of the English-speaking countries entered the war with conscript armies. All the other combatants entered the war with systems of conscription already in place. This did not mean that there was no controversy in Continental Europe. On the contrary, in democratic France, an enormous campaign had been mounted to resist the extension of conscription from two to three years shortly before the war broke out. And in semi-autocratic Germany, the Social Democratic Party viewed the military as a bastion of Wilhelmian autocracy and had long resisted funding military activities. Nevertheless, even among socialists, clear underlying differences with the English-speaking world remained. In the most sustained treatment of the is­ sue, the French socialist leader, Jean Jaures, writing in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair, argued that the existing standing army led by a professional officer class should be replaced by a reserve force of citizens’ militias modeled on the experience of the French Revolution and the Swiss militia system.8 And both the German Social Democrats and the Socialist International as a whole had similar aspirations.9 In France and Germany universal military service could be seen as a way of democratising the army and as a form of insurance against the dangers of military despotism. In the English-speaking countries it was more often seen as a potential threat to individual liberty and one of the main symptoms of ‘continental despotism’. The influence of these differences continued to be felt after the First World War. Indeed, on 6 7

8 9

Coast Seamen’s Journal, 11 April 1917, editorial; New York Call, 29 Nov 1916, 3; Intercollegiate Socialist, Feb–Mar 1917, 12. Robin Archer, ‘”Quite Like Ourselves”: Opposition to Military Compulsion during the Great War in the United States and Australia’ (paper presented at the AustraliaUS Transnational and Comparative Labour History Conference, University of Sydney, 8–9 January 2015), 13–18. Jean Jaures, L’Armee Nouvelle (Paris, 1910) and Harvey Goldberg, The Life of Jean Jaures (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), 385–9. See James Joll, The Second International 1889–1914 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1955), 109–12, 197; and Babel in Hew Strachan, The Outbreak of the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 189.

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Introduction

the eve of the Second World War, even the usually disciplined Communists divided on the issue. While the British Communist Party supported Labour opposition to a Conservative Bill to reintroduce conscription in April 1939, the French Communist Party adopted a pro-conscription stance (a position that continued to be held by some Eurocommunist parties into the late twentieth century).10 The political culture and values of the English-speaking world loomed large in Australia too. Yet within the English-speaking world, Australia was doubly unusual. It was both the first country (along with New Zealand) to breach these norms, and the only one to uphold them when war actually struck. Although none of the English-speaking countries entered the war with conscript armies, there had been significant efforts to change this in the dec­ ade before the war. Major campaigns to push for some form of compulsory military service or training had been mounted. These campaigns had been checked in Britain and North America, but in Australia and New Zealand they were successful, despite considerable debate about whether compulsory military service should be seen as a flagrant breach of liberal principles or a progressive innovation along the lines of a Swiss-style citizen militia. In Australia, where one of its main supporters was William Morris Hughes, legis­lation to introduce compulsory military training was passed in 1909 and it began to be implemented in 1911.11 Much to the delight of the conserva­ tive leaders of the movement for compulsory military service in Britain and the United States, Australia became a poster boy for their campaigns. Yet in the course of the war, wherever governments in English-speaking countries made an effort to introduce conscription, they eventually suc­ceed­ ed.12 Sometimes, conscription was introduced rapidly upon entry into the war – like in the United States, which entered the war in April 1917. But usually it was only introduced and implemented well after entry and after long periods of anguished debate – first in Britain in early 1916, then in New Zealand in late 1916, and eventually in Canada in late 1917. Only in Australia was opposition strong enough to stop it from ever being introduced. 10 11 12

Kevin Morgan, ‘Militarism and Anti-militarism: Socialists, Communists and Conscrip­ tion in France and Britain 1900–1940’, Past and Present, no. 202 (2009): 207–44. John Barrett, Falling In: Australians and ‘Boy Conscription’ 1911–1915 (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1979); Thomas W. Tanner, Compulsory Citizen Soldiers (Sydney: Alternative Publishing Co-operative, 1980). In South Africa, with a minority settler population, sharply divided in the wake of the Boer War, there was no such effort. Fear of losing the colony loomed larger than fear of losing the war.

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T he Conscription Conflict and the Great War

In the early twentieth century, Australia was often described as a social and political laboratory. It was one of a small number of precocious democra­cies. Only a handful of countries had introduced manhood suffrage. Fewer still had introduced a comparable suffrage for women. It had also experimented with innovative systems of industrial relations and early welfare state polices. And it had an unusually powerful labour movement that had founded a labour-based party that was far and away the most electorally successful in the world – so successful that it had returned to power just after the war broke out.13 The conscription conflict tested the forms of debate, the limits of tolerance, the power of organised labour, the significance of gendered appeals, the structure of the party system and the possibility of democratic deliberation in a time of war. The conflict and its outcome had a fundamental impact, not only on the war effort, and the way it was experienced and remembered, but on the entire character of postwar politics and postwar life. The purpose of this book is to reassess this seminal conflict, to restore it to a central place in our understanding of the war years and their legacy, and to contribute to a wider discussion about the politics of conscription inter­ nationally. We have sought to do this by assembling a group of experts from the disciplines of history, political science and sociology – both in Australia and overseas. More specifically, the book aims to: 1. Offer new interpretations of the conflict’s origins, course, and con­ sequences. There has been no book length treatment of the conflict since Leslie Jauncey’s effort to document some of the key actors, developments and sources in 1935.14

2. Compare the Australian conflict with the experience in other countries and examine transnational influences. Comparison with the historically liberal English-speaking countries, which began the war without conscription and with long traditions of opposition to it, is especially important. 3. Intervene in current debates about how to understand the war by contributing to a more accurate and rounded picture of how it was 13 14

Robin Archer, ‘Stopping War and Stopping Conscription: Australian Labour’s Response to World War I in Comparative Perspective’, Labour History 10 (1914): 61, Table 1. Leslie C. Jauncey, The Story of Conscription in Australia (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1935). The book was reissued in 1968 (South Melbourne: The Macmillan Company of Australia), during the conscription debates that accompanied Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War, with a foreword by P. O’Farrell.

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Introduction

experienced. Recent years have witnessed a growing tendency to define what is distinctive about Australia in martially inflected terms and to obscure the different values that led many Australians to engage in an intense democratic struggle over the war’s conduct. The authors are not, of course, all of one mind. Nevertheless, a number of recurring themes emerge from the book. One of the most frequently recur­ ring concerns the importance attached to the impact of ideas in general and liberal ideas in particular. Contrary to earlier studies that treated the use of liberal language as either insincere or unimportant compared to other underlying interests, many of the present contributors consider liberal commitments as central motivations in their own right. This comes through particularly clearly in analyses of the arguments and motivations of anti-conscriptionists, but the importance attached to liberal values by pro-conscriptionists is also highlighted. Among those who em­ phasise the importance of these values, debate remains about the rela­tion­ship between different strands of liberalism, including: (a) the relationship between radical liberalism and liberal imperialism; (b) the relationship between rad­ ical liberalism and the New (or Social) Liberalism; (c) the relationship between British liberal traditions and liberal traditions in Australia (and the United States); (d) the relationship between the New Liberalism and the labour movement and its anti-conscriptionism, and (e) the relationship between the use of freedom language and the Republican, Civic Humanist or neoRoman traditions. Other recurring themes include the widespread (and orthodox) agreement on the centrality of the labour movement, the attention paid to women as activists and voters and the significance of gendered appeals, a wariness about overstating the importance attached to religious motivations and church leaders, especially during the first referendum, and uncertainty about the effect of racial hostility given the widespread and contradictory appeal both sides made to it. There is also recurring acknowledgment of the importance of transnational effects and the value of international comparison. Australian debates were influenced by, and in turn influenced, debates in Britain, the United States and elsewhere in the English-speaking world. And comparisons are made between the Australian experience and the experiences of a number of these countries, especially Britain. In addition, there is an awareness that the legacy of the conscription conflict and the defeat of conscription was paradoxical – especially for –7–

T he Conscription Conflict and the Great War

progressives. On the one hand, the conflict over conscription helped stall Australia’s social experimentation. In its wake, parts of the country retreated into a kind of British loyalist parochialism. The Labor Party was weakened. And in the absence of conscription, veterans (rather than citizens in general) were singled out as worthy of greater support, and welfare state development stalled. On the other hand the conflict and the referendums that settled its outcome were a unique and internationally remarkable manifestation of strikingly progressive features of Australian politics and society – features like the strength of its liberal tradition, its early embrace of democracy, and the precocious political power of its labour movement. The volume is divided into four parts: ‘Origins’ (Chapters One and Two); ‘Campaigns and Results’ (Chapters Three to Five); ‘Comparisons’ (Chapters Six and Seven); and ‘Legacies’ (Chapter Eight). Together, these constitute an examination of the background, unfolding, international context, and consequences for Australia of its conscription struggles. In Chapter One, ‘“A real heritage of the English people”: British Liberal­ ism and “Continental Despotism”’, Douglas Newton considers the place of conscription in British political history. Newton suggests that for many liberals of the nineteenth century, opposition to military conscription served as an abiding principle; it was often invoked as a defining element of liberal tradition and a point of differentiation between Britain and the despotic regimes of Napoleonic France or Bismarck’s Germany. Nonetheless, as the golden age of Gladstone passed, a number of leading liberals equivocated. From the 1890s, ‘Liberal Imperialists’ (among them future Prime Minister Herbert Asquith) ceased to reject conscription as a matter of principle and instead regarded the policy as something of an expedient. For them, defence of the Empire merited pre-eminence. Though resisted by both Gladstonian Liberals and many of the ‘New Liberals’, the Liberal Imperialists enjoyed support from those outside the Party, including the National Service League and elements of the press. They came to dominate Asquith’s Cabinet. In consequence, when the struggle for victory on the battlefront intensified, the British Government eventually supported conscription, managing to pass enabling legislation by substantial majorities. Eventually, more than half of British soldiers sent into combat were dispatched as conscripts. Liberal principles did not prevail in Britain; ‘Continental Despotism’ crossed the channel. Robin Archer turns to developments within the Australian Common­ wealth in Chapter Two: ‘Labour and Liberty: The Origins of the Conscription Referendum’. Archer’s aim is to explain why the Labor Government of –8–

Introduction

William Hughes resolved to hold a referendum on conscription for overseas service. As Archer argues, the short answer is that, among Labor MPs, Hughes was in a minority on conscription and even if he had prevailed in the House of Representatives his proposals would not have passed the Senate. Underlying this, however, was the widespread and enduring influence of liberal values within much of the Australian labour movement. A great many Australian labour activists understood conscription as a danger to dem­oc­ racy and liberty. Inheritors of an evolving liberal tradition, their arguments repeatedly and passionately invoked the language of ‘slavery’ and ‘liberty’. They emphasised the particular threat of a ‘militarised’ workplace. And their fears were compounded and intensified by an increasingly authori­ tarian environment, marked by censorship, police raids, attacks on public assemblies, and Hughes’ shrill militaristic rhetoric. Archer’s emphasis on the central import of liberal principles is a challenge to earlier historical scholars­hip, with significant implications for labour historiography, as well as for an understanding of the war. In the closing pages of his chapter, he therefore anticipates possible objections to his thesis and defends it against the main interpretations of the conscription conflict advanced in previous research. Two succeeding chapters scrutinise the conscription campaigns in some depth. In Chapter Three, Frank Bongiorno examines the anti-conscriptionist movement, encompassing the individuals, organisations and arguments that were mobilised to defeat Hughes’ proposals. Bongiorno presents the ‘anti’ campaign as a kind of ‘united front’: based largely in the powerful labour movement, but drawing not only on the major trade unions and Labor activists, but also from feminists, pacifists, Irish Catholics, and revolutionary socialists. While these activists disagreed about many issues, they cooperated around opposition to Hughes’ plans. Like Archer, Bongiorno is convinced of the import of appeals to ‘freedom’ and ‘British liberty’. He notes the adoption of these concepts and the arguments associated with them by the ‘No’ campaign. He also gives close attention to: the strong interest in British events; the place of violence in the Australian struggle; the centrality of wo­ men as campaigners as well as objects of appeal; and the role of lesser-known figures in the ‘anti’ cause, who are often overlooked in earlier scholarship. Joy Damousi’s chapter offers a more selective investigation of the ‘proconscription’ cause. Alongside the familiar examination of Hughes’ inde­ fatigable and polarising presence, she grants special attention to lesser-known advocates of a ‘Yes’ vote − medical professionals and academics at the Uni­ versity of Melbourne. A close study of the latter, in particular, discloses how –9–

T he Conscription Conflict and the Great War

many important champions of conscription remained committed to the value of ‘democracy’ and supportive of a free wartime debate. Some proconscriptionists, moreover, became active supporters of international under­ standing through the ‘League of Nations Union’ in the years after World War One. Her chapter invites similar investigations into the mobilisation in favour of conscription by other academics and professionals. In Chapter Five, Murray Goot considers the outcome of the two referendums. Both a survey of the literature on the topic and an independent contribution, Goot’s comprehensive study introduces the reader to earlier attempts to understand the results, scrutinises the assumptions behind these attempts, and re-analyses the voting patterns − including detailed com­ par­isons between the referendum results and the results of the 1914 and 1917 elections − on which these earlier attempts were based. In doing so, he draws attention, for the first time, to the crucial importance of changes in turnout. He shows that the weight attached to the votes of British migrants, Australians of German background, and especially those living in rural electorates, has been exaggerated. He identifies a common failure to appreciate the limits of the data available – most notably the constant confusion between data about electorates and data about individuals − and he points to possible strategies that might address such limits. Part Three provides some of the international context through which Australian experiences might be more fully understood. In Chapter Six, John Connor asks ‘Why was it easier to introduce and implement conscription in some countries than in others?’ His answer establishes that outside the English-speaking world conscription was uniformly applied by the major combatants, and he sets out the different ways in which conscription eventually came to be implemented in nearly all of the English-speaking states as well. Only in Australia did citizens have an opportunity to vote on the matter and only in Australia was government pressure to introduce con­scrip­tion stymied. Connor reaches several conclusions that help to explain these differences. First, conscription appears to have been easier to implement when governments pursued the policy closer to the decision to enter the war. Second, the holding of a plebiscite made conscription harder to introduce. Third, the strength of the labour movement both politically and industrially raised important obstacles. Connor’s chapter is also concerned with transnational relationships. He notes that developments in each English-speaking country were closely followed in the others, influencing the arguments and strategies of conscription’s supporters and its opponents. – 10 –

Introduction

In Chapter Seven, Ross McKibbin explores the quite different social, economic and military contexts in Australia and Great Britain. He argues that these differences help to explain why a system of conscription (which in practice embraced both the military and civil spheres) was successful­ ly implemented in Britain, whereas a narrower system of purely military conscription was rejected in Australia. McKibbin also considers the conse­ quences of these different paths. In Britain, he suggests, the establishment of conscription during World War One entrenched the principle over the longer term; damaged the Liberal Party; brought the trade unions into a closer relationship with government; and helped to underpin postwar unity. In Australia, by contrast, the successful campaign to prevent conscription ultimately damaged the Labor Party, inflamed sectarianism, and contributed to subsequent divisions between former volunteers and those who did not serve. The ‘victory’ of the Australian labour movement was ambiguous. The final chapter, by Sean Scalmer, examines the ways in which the con­scription conflict has been remembered. Scalmer argues that the events of 1916 and 1917 have generally been remembered in one of two sharply contrasting ways: one, as a democratic victory by the labour movement, in particular, over militarism; the other, as a lament for a conflict that generated little more than bitterness and division. Scalmer suggests that the labour ‘legend’ was initially stronger, and retained currency for several generations. Over time, however, the lament over divisions has come to dominate historical memory. In consequence, the character and the democratic significance of the conscription conflict is now not widely understood. Together, the eight chapters constitute a joint effort to comprehend Australia’s great conscription conflict. Work collected here is also embedded in a larger collective project. The book chapters were first presented at an expert workshop convened by the editors and held at the University of Melbourne in April 2015. The generous sponsorship of the Academy of the Social Sciences made that gathering possible and enabled the arguments of each chapter to be given detailed attention first by a dedicated discussant and then by the group as a whole. In addition to the contributors to this book, valued work­ shop participants included Carolyn Holbrook, Marilyn Lake, Marian Sawer, Paul Strangio, and Bart Zino. Caitlin Stone at the Baillieu Library, and Alex Dellios and Mary Tomsic (of the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne) all provided vital organisational support. In bringing the book to publication, Nathan Hollier of Monash University Publishing has been an enthusiastic, flexible, thoughtful and intelligent – 11 –

T he Conscription Conflict and the Great War

part­ner. Les Thomas, also at Monash, has been efficient and effective. At the University of Melbourne, Liam Byrne (of the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies) and Katie Wood (of the University of Melbourne Archives) have been generous with their expertise and their labour in the effort to identify and reproduce illustrations. For their help with permissions and assistance in reproducing images, thanks are also due to the University of Melbourne Archives, the State Library of New South Wales, the State Library of Victoria, the Australian War Memorial, and the Catholic Arch­ diocese of Melbourne. Australia’s great conscription conflict is a major episode in Australian history. Though it once fascinated observers from around the world, it is now little known overseas. Within Australia, it is widely mis­understood. We hope this book helps change this. We also hope it contributes to a fuller understanding of the First World War, of what the Commonwealth of Australia once was, and of what it may yet be.

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Part 1 Origins

Cha pte r O ne

‘A R E A L H ER I TAGE OF T H E E NGL I SH PE OPL E ’ British Liberalism and ‘Continental Despotism’ Douglas Newton

‘Free Trade’, ‘Free Speech’, ‘Free Churches in a Free State’, ‘Freedom of Conscience’ – and ‘Free Service’. These were the catch-cries that made Liberal hearts beat faster in nineteenth-century Britain. The last, ‘Free Service’, reflected a deep wariness of militarism. Conscription was reviled as ‘Continental Despotism’. A vainglorious British ruling class might dream of conscription – the people would never stand for it. For Liberals, the principle of voluntary service was sacred. And yet, this was the principle that was to be abandoned by a Liberal Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, during the Great War. In January 1916 Asquith himself introduced the Bill imposing conscription upon unmarried men.1 A week later the House of Commons approved its Second Reading. Only 41 MPs opposed the Bill – 28 Liberals, eleven Labour, and two Irish. The great majority of Liberal MPs sided with Asquith.2 What had become of imperishable Liberal principles? This chapter aims to show that the capitulation had been long prepared: that the anti-militarist tradition within nineteenth-century Liberalism was equivocal; that Liberal Imperialism in the 1890s produced prominent Liberal Party personalities who held no principled objection to conscription; that the counter-blast 1 2

Parliamentary Debates, Commons, vol. 77, 949–1074 (5 January 1916), hereafter abbreviated in this style, Hansard, HC 77: 949–1074. Hansard, HC 77: 1739 (12 January 1916).

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Chapter One

of New Liberalism, and the joint Radical-New Liberal crusade against the Boer War (1899–1902), only temporarily shifted the balance of power toward anti-militarism in the party; that the New Liberals’ willingness to contem­ plate compulsion in social reform left them vulnerable to the argument that compul­sion was necessary in a military emergency; and, that the advance of ‘navalism’ inside the party before 1914 undermined anti-militarist instincts, further weakening the chances of a principled opposition to conscription.

Foundation Stones British Liberals rejoiced in their Whig history. They proudly recalled the days of resistance to the Stuart Kings and their ‘standing army’, a curse ruled out in the Bill of Rights of 1689. Thereafter, voluntary service was seen as the essential rampart against militarism in Britain. Liberals lived by progressive lights: the belief in growing international harmony through the free interchange of goods; the strict application of the doctrine of nonintervention in Britain’s foreign policy; and the conviction that a resort to war was almost always wrong – the work of self-interested imperialists manipulating the nation to wage war in their private interests. Who contributed most to this Liberal cultural script? The two pillars of fire from the mid-Victorian period, Richard Cobden and John Bright, were the mythic heroes. Cobden coined the slogan ‘Commerce is the Grand Panacea’ – because, in an economically integrated world, no one should wish to slaughter a customer. For Cobden, Free Trade and the peace movement were ‘one and the same cause’. 3 As early as 1849 Cobden famously put forward in the House of Commons a vision of international arbi­tra­tion displacing war entirely.4 Opposing the Crimean War, he argued that Britain must not presume ‘to act the part of a military nation of the first rank on the Continent’ – for that was the road to conscription.5 By the 1860s, Cobden’s ‘favourite formula’ of ‘No Foreign Politics’ was ‘being practically adopted by most politicians’. 6 John Bright added the ‘Principle of Non3

4 5 6

Cobden, ‘Commerce is the Grand Panacea’, in E. K. Bramsted and K. J. Melhuish, eds., Western Liberalism: A History in documents from Locke to Croce (London: Longman, 1978), 354, and Cobden quoted in John Morley, Life of Richard Cobden (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1903), 230. Cobden, 12 June 1849, in Bramsted and Melhuish, Western Liberalism, 374–8. Cobden to Edward Ellice, 12 March 1855, in Anthony Howe and Simon Morgan, eds., The Letters of Richard Cobden, Vol. III, 1854–1859 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 107. ‘Topics of the Day’, The Spectator, 16 July 1864, 4.

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Intervention’.7 Joining Cobden in steadfast resistance to the Crimean War, Bright delivered peace speeches that captured Liberal imaginations. All knew his evocation of the ‘Angel of Death’, his mockery of British imperial diplomacy as ‘a gigantic system of out-door relief for the aristocracy’, and his attack upon ‘the balance of power’ as a ‘foul idol’.8 Victorian Liberal politicians often presented their stout opposition to con­scrip­t ion as reflecting a national consensus. When the Crimean War was over, even the war-making Liberal Prime Minister Lord Palmerston boasted of avoiding conscription.9 Edward Cardwell, the Liberal military reformer, asserted in 1871 that opposition to conscription was ‘the general opinion of the House’.10 Indeed, Conservative politicians often spoke as if conscription was impossible – simply ‘inconsistent with the habits and instincts of this country’.11 As Martin Ceadel notes, in the mid-Victorian period, the Conservative Party chose not to ‘seriously challenge the lib­ er­a l anathema of large standing armies’.12 Liberal politicians frequently denounced conscription as alien – a product of the despised despotisms that ruled in Napoleonic France, Prussia, and Tsarist Russia.13

Equivocations But the denunciation of conscription in Liberal ranks was not without equivocation. Few made the argument that society simply had no right to trample upon the conscience of a man who refused combat. Even the greatest nineteenth-century Liberal ideologue John Stuart Mill contemplated en­ forced military service. Certainly in his writings Mill generally deprecated international rivalry, armaments, and war. Mill also recommended the principle of Non-Intervention.14 On the other hand, he supported Britain’s civilising despotism over ‘barbarous peoples’ in the colonial world, a kind of 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

John Bright, Speech at Edinburgh, 13 October 1853, in Bramsted and Melhuish, Western Liberalism, 359–61. G. M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London: Constable, 1913), 244, 274 and 334. Hansard, HC 142: 228 (8 May 1856) and 806 (30 May 1856). Hansard, HC 207: 1344–5 (10 July 1871). Sir John Trollope, Hansard, HC 142: 1552 (16 June 1856). Martin Ceadel, The Origins of War Prevention: The British Peace Movement and International Relations, 1730–1854 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 130. For example, Hansard, HC 169: 879–943 (27 February 1863) and HC 172: 1058–136 (20 July 1863). Mill, ‘A Few Words on Non-Intervention’ (1859), in Bramsted and Melhuish, Western Liberalism, 363–370.

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Chapter One

Imperial Liberalism.15 He did not condemn all wars. He famously backed the North in the American Civil War in 1861.16 Mill conceded in On Liberty (1859) that society had the right to force every person to bear their share of ‘the labours and sacrifices incurred for defending the society or its members from injury and molestation’.17 He privately supported the idea of ‘an armed people’.18 He favoured compulsory military service on the Swiss model, including school drill, plus a strong navy.19 The Liberal celebrity whose opinion mattered most was, of course, the per­en­n ial Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone. He embodied the wider Liberal movement’s hopes for an era of peace built on Free Trade and a moral foreign policy.20 Gladstone famously revived the Liberal movement’s watchwords of the 1830s, ‘Peace, Retrenchment and Reform’, and made these the Liberal Party’s election-winning slogan of 1880. Popular Gladstonians assured the nation that voluntary service was safe under Gladstone.21 Nonetheless, Gladstone was not an isolationist. He believed in ‘the public law of Europe’ and contemplated interventions to uphold it. Cobden and Bright’s ‘isolationism’ had become influential in the mid-Victorian Liberal Party in a reaction against Lord Palmerston who was seen as a ‘truculent defencist’.22 But Gladstone advocated a ‘moderate interventionism’. He ini­ tially supported British intervention in the Crimean War against despotic Russia. He accepted the ‘geo-strategic orthodoxies’, namely, that Britain had an interest in safeguarding the independence of the Low Countries (while rejecting those who made a fetish of this and demanded intervention in the Franco-Prussian conflict in 1870).23 He clung to the ‘High-Church ideology of the Concert of Europe’. The Great Powers, he preached, should act together for moral purposes, for example, against Turkey over the atrocities 15

Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), Ch. 5. 16 Georgios Varouxakis, Liberty Abroad: J. S. Mill on International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 155. 17 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Kitchener: Batoche, 2001), 69. 18 Varouxakis, Liberty Abroad, 167. 19 Varouxakis, Liberty Abroad, 168–87. 20 Eugenio F. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 101. 21 Biagini, Liberty, 1. 22 Martin Ceadel, ‘Gladstone and a Liberal Theory of International Relations’, in Peter Ghosh and Lawrence Goldman, Politics and Culture in Victorian Britain: Essays in Memory of Colin Matthew (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 74–86. 23 Gladstone, Hansard, HC 203: 1786–8 (10 Aug. 1870).

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T he Conscription Conflict and the Great War

in Bulgaria in the late 1870s and in Armenia in 1896. Spectacularly, he disappointed many Liberals when he launched armed intervention in Egypt in 1882.24 Whatever blots Radicals might have detected on his record, Gladstone gained great distinction in their eyes at the end of his career. He resigned as Prime Minister in 1894 in protest at his own ministers’ determination to boost Britain’s naval spending – ‘an act of militarism’, as Gladstone wrote, ‘which excuses thus the militarism of Germany, France or Russia’. He refused to ‘dress Liberalism in Tory clothes’ and stood firm against ‘a policy that will be taken as plunging England into the whirlpool of militarism’.25 As Ceadel concludes, Gladstone’s achievement was to enshrine an ethical ‘pacificist rhetoric’ on the British Left. However, in practical terms Gladstone’s liberal internationalism was limited. Gladstone and his party failed to develop a ‘Liberal International’ or to prepare opinion for inter­national ar­bi­tration.26 Indeed, Gladstone had offered only lukewarm support to his party colleague, Henry Richard, when he agitated in 1873 for Britain to champion international arbitration.27 Most importantly, Gladstone left no phrases that took wing on conscription itself, nothing committing Liberal­ism unshakeably to the voluntary principle.

The Liberal Imperialists and the Permeation of Militarism During the 1890s a new movement emerged within the Liberal Party, Liberal Imperialism, which regarded the Empire, and its defence, as an allencompassing ideal. Members of the Liberal Imperialist faction, sometimes dubbed ‘Limps’, attempted to reconcile the party to a reformist ‘social im­ perialism’.28 This faction included some of the brightest rising stars of the party, such as Richard Haldane, Edward Grey, and Herbert Asquith – ‘babies in intrigue’ as John Morley, the Radical, saw them.29 The ‘Limps’ looked to 24 25 26 27 28 29

‘Ministers at the Mansion House’, Manchester Guardian, 10 August 1882, 5. Gladstone, quoted in Ian St John, Gladstone and the Logic of Victorian Politics (London: Anthem, 2010), 384, and in John Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone (London: Macmillan, 1903), vol. III, 507–8. Ceadel, ‘Gladstone’, 76. Gwyn Griffiths, Henry Richard: Apostle of Peace and Welsh Patriot (London: Boutle, 2012), 185–8. The leading study is H. C. G. Matthew, The Liberal Imperialists: The Ideas and Politics of a Post-Gladstonian Élite (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). Morley quoted in Matthew, Liberal Imperialists, 85.

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Chapter One

the powerful figure of Archibald Primrose, Earl of Rosebery, as their leader. The Roseberians hoped to challenge the assumption that the Conservative Party was the ‘Imperial Party’. As Grey expressed it, the Liberal Party had to break with ‘the Little Englander view’, and repel the charge that the Liberals harboured an ‘aimless antipathy to the British Empire’.30 Rosebery and his supporters had come to doubt the wisdom of the ‘Grand Old Man’ who took office as Prime Minister for the fourth time in 1892. In his last years in government, in their view, Gladstone had surrendered to Radical ‘faddists’ in the National Liberal Federation, and his ‘sop-throwing’ had ‘demoralised’ the Liberal Party.31 The ‘Limps’ disparaged all precise programmes, including the famous Radical Newcastle Programme of 1891, as a ‘surrender of govern[men]t to democracy’.32 Moreover, the party was, they complained, insufficiently ‘national’ in spirit, that is, too close to the special interests of the Irish or Welsh, and was in danger of becoming a ‘party of protest’.33 To remedy this, solid middle-class support needed to be restored, and Liberal Imperialism was the restorative. Lord Rosebery’s brief period as Liberal Prime Minister in 1894–95 nat­ ural­ly boosted the careers and hopes of his young acolytes. But they were soon disappointed. Rosebery led the party to defeat at the general election of July 1895, and in its aftermath he faded. He resigned as party leader in October 1896. This resignation, in the words of Lord Crewe, was ‘the outward and visible demonstration of the truth long apparent to initiates, that the gulf between the two sections of the Liberal party, roughly distinguished as the Liberal Imperialist and the Little Englander wing, was steadily widening’.34 During the long period of Conservative dominance, from 1895 to 1905, this gulf proved impossible to bridge. Passionate antagonisms inside the Liberal Party were again fuelled by disputes over imperialism. The Boer War (1899–1902) exacerbated them. Anti-war Radicals were smeared as ‘ProBoers’. No controversy was more raucous than that sparked by the party leader Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. On 14 June 1901, he criticised the British army’s tactics in South Africa as ‘methods of barbarism’.35 Radicals, most notably Morley, joined their leader in denouncing the war. Gradually 30 ‘Sir Edward Grey at Peterborough’, The Times, 18 July 1901, 6. 31 Haldane and Rosebery quoted in Matthew, Liberal Imperialists, 126. 32 Robert Perks quoted in Matthew, Liberal Imperialists, 126. 33 Matthew, Liberal Imperialists, 133. 34 Marquess of Crewe, Lord Rosebery (London: Murray, 1931), Vol. II, 530. 35 Stephen Koss, ed., The Pro-Boers: the Anatomy of an Antiwar Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1973), 214–34.

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T he Conscription Conflict and the Great War

the reputations of the strident anti-imperialists in the party recovered, because the long war proved to be so costly and damaging to Britain’s good name. But the Liberal Imperialist faction did not accept that the war discredited imperialism. The ‘Limps’ lavished praise upon the army and its generals. The faction reorganised itself as the ‘Liberal League’. This ginger group was launched at the London home of Lord Rosebery in Berkeley Square in February 1902, and he happily accepted appointment as its first President. Asquith drafted a ‘Liberal League Manifesto’. It cast the Liberal Party as ‘Progressive (Practical) and National’. It embraced both the Empire and social reform. It loyally declared support for ‘a vigorous prosecution of the war’. On ‘Imperial and domestic policy’ it wanted ‘a fresh start’; it refused ‘to prescribe a programme’ but looked vaguely to the resolution of problems in ‘education, temperance, housing, poor law reform, land tenure & local taxation’. Most significantly, in foreign relations and ‘Imperial defence’, the Manifesto urged ‘continuity of policy’ – a nod to the Tories’ imperialism.36 During the war in South Africa, the Liberal Imperialists tilted toward conscription.37 Grey exemplified the attitude. In March 1900 he told the City Liberal Club: ‘If we were pressed from outside we might have to resort to conscription, and if ever we were to do so we should do so as cheerfully, at any rate, as any of our Continental neighbours (hear, hear); but mean­ while it was our legitimate pride that the British Empire could be upheld by the voluntary system. (Cheers.)’38 In 1901 he again publicly suggested that conscription was an option, but noted he ‘was not convinced of the necessity’.39 Political expedience simply dictated that other methods should be tried first. This resonated with those who preached some kind of military training, at least for the young, to improve their stamina – and build ‘National Efficiency’.40 That slogan certainly had wide appeal.41 Accordingly, the ‘Limps’ mixed freely across the political spectrum, as they debated various schemes to lift up ‘the imperial race’. The most important setting was the ‘Coefficients Club’, 36 Matthew, Liberal Imperialists, 302–3. 37 Matthew, Liberal Imperialists, 141. 38 ‘Sir E. Grey on the War’, The Times, 21 March 1900, 6. 39 ‘Sir Edward Grey in Liverpool’, The Times, 14 November 1901, 6. 40 Jonathan Rose, The Edwardian Temperament: 1895–1919 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986), 135. 41 Geoffrey Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency: A Study in British Politics and Political Thought, 1899–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 2.

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Chapter One

launched by Leo Amery, the Milnerite, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, the Fabians, in 1902. Here the Liberal Leaguers and Fabians talked with Tariff Reform Leaguers and National Service Leaguers, forming a ‘kind of nonparty Shadow Cabinet of experts’. These ‘Coefficients’ became, as Robert Scally has argued, the ‘primary carriers of Social-Imperialist ideas’ into the corridors of Edwardian power.42

Radicalism, the New Liberalism and Resistance to Liberal Imperialism But by no means did Liberal Imperialism hypnotise all in the Liberal camp. It was but one faction – if the most disruptive.43 On the Left of the party, old and new movements came together to strengthen the progressive wing. The old-style Cobdenite or Gladstonian Radicals happily accepted the label ‘Little Englander’ as advertising their hostility to imperial war. Sitting in the Commons in their customary den ‘below the gangway’, these Radicals proudly defied ‘the peerage, the beerage, and war’.44 Typical was Sir Wilfrid Lawson who in February 1898 jeered at Joseph Chamberlain for promoting an imperialist policy of ‘more markets, more money, more murder’, which had produced ‘enormous taxation and our bloated armaments’. Lawson assert­ed that ‘The policy of the great Englander is profit by plunder, whilst the policy of the little Englander is profit by peace’.45 Linked to Radicalism was the intellectual movement known as the New Liberalism.46 The New Liberals were domestic interventionists. Impatient with the old verities of laissez-faire and self-help, they advanced new state initiatives in social policy to achieve the common good. Income-related taxes should fund public goods, giving opportunities for self-development to the people. State-sponsored social insurance should protect them from hard­ships. Inspired by idealist philosophies, New Liberals challenged the classical liberal attachment to freedom of contract. Social policy, they argued, 42 43 44 45 46

Robert J. Scally, The Origins of the Lloyd George Coalition: The Politics of Social Imperialism, 1900–1918 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 79–81. Ian Packer, Liberal Government and Politics, 1905–15 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 3. Stefan Collini, Liberalism and Sociology: L. T. Hobhouse and Political Argument in England, 1880–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 87. Hansard, HC 53: 591 (14 Feb. 1898). The landmark studies are Peter Clarke, Liberals and Social Democrats (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), and Michael Freeden, The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986).

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T he Conscription Conflict and the Great War

should establish a ‘national minimum’; competition could flourish above the line, but nobody should be forced to live or work below it. In foreign policy, the New Liberals were often critical of imperialism, militarism, and Britain’s entanglement in the rivalries of the Continent – because ‘bloated armaments’ drained funds from social reform. Liberal intellectuals such as L. T. Hobhouse and J. A. Hobson honed the new doctrine, and a discussion group of journalists and parliamentarians known as the ‘Rainbow circle’ promoted it. Powerful journalists gave it a platform. Promising MPs took up the cause. And within the Liberal ministry from 1906, Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, Herbert Samuel, and Charles Masterman planned the social reforms inspired by it. New Liberalism could muster formidable intellects. However, it could not capture the Liberal Party, and certainly it ‘did nothing to heal the rifts’ at the top.47 No new ideological unity was forged. On the Left the various labels remained fluid. Some Radicals were New Liberals – but not all, for some, such as Josiah Wedgwood, Morley, and his younger adviser Francis Hirst, were Cobdenites shy of bold experiments in social policy.48 Some New Liberals rejoiced in the label ‘Little Englander’ – but not all, for some, such as Herbert Samuel, still hoped for a more progressive imperialism.49 Some New Liberals – such as Masterman – kept open connections with men on the Right.50 Some Radicals, such as Lord Loreburn and Lewis Harcourt, while trenchant critics of militarism, could be cool on domestic reforms such as women’s suffrage.51 The critical question is whether the New Liberals stood firm on the issues of imperialism and war? Undoubtedly they did, in company with the Cobdenite Radicals, while the Boer War stirred their anti-militarist passions. Five months into that war, concerned Liberals met in conference at the Westminster Palace Hotel on 14 February 1900. Hirst, a self-declared Cobdenite, and J. L. Hammond, a convinced New Liberal, were the 47

David Powell, British Politics, 1910–1935: The Crisis of the Party System (London: Routledge, 2004), 42. 48 Paul Mulvey, The Political Life of Josiah C. Wedgwood (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2010), 31, David Hamer, John Morley: Liberal Intellectual in Politics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), 378–9, and Jaime Reynolds, ‘The Last of the Liberals: Francis Wrigley Hirst (1873–1953)’, Journal of Liberal History, 47 (Summer 2005), 22–9. 49 Samuel’s address, Document 50, 17 January 1900, in Michael Freeden, ed., Minutes of the Rainbow Circle, 1894–1924 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1989), 73–4. 50 Scally, Origins, 94, 139, 141. 51 ‘Woman Suffrage’, The Times, 29 Feb. 1912, 6.

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Chapter One

organising spirits.52 Various speakers attacked the war and vowed to resist the looming ‘abhorred blood-tax’ of conscription.53 At the conference, a League of Liberals Against Aggression and Militarism was formed. Famous names, both Radicals and New Liberals, were enlisted. The parliamentarians included old hands and young bloods, Gladstonians and New Liberals, such as Sir John Brunner, C. P. Scott, Lloyd George, and Alexander MacCallum Scott, Secretary of the League. The program was concise yet bold. ‘To com­ bat, by vigorous propaganda, the growth of Aggressive Imperialism and Militarism’. The League sought ‘peace and conciliation’ on the model of the Hague Conference, a curb on ‘the alarming growth of armaments’, and a quick settlement of the war.54 Opposition to conscription was prominent in the League’s propaganda. In July 1900, the League’s Executive asserted that ‘the Imperialism of Mr. Chamberlain and the Expansionists’ was driving straight for ‘Protection and Conscription’.55 In countering this, the League invoked the Gladstonian heri­tage. In November 1900, the League declared its adherence to ‘the Policy of Peace, Retrenchment and Reform which has been handed down to us by the greatest leaders of that [Liberal] Party’.56 In lectures and leaflets during 1901, the League attacked the Tories’ ‘veiled threat of conscription’.57 Pamphlets criticised the Conservatives’ fascination with ‘the German sys­ tem’.58 The League cooperated avidly with the National Reform Union (NRU) in this work. Both worshipped the same party gods. As the NRU declared in early 1902, the Liberal Party must reject ‘sordid and flashy Imperialism’ and return to ‘that great gospel gloriously propounded and established in the teachings of Cobden, Bright, and Gladstone’. These were not ‘musty shibboleths’ but rather ‘the essential condition of all genuine Liberalism’.59 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

Stewart Weaver, The Hammonds: A Marriage in History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 61. Francis Hirst, In the Golden Days (London: Muller, 1947), 200–01. Minute Book of the League of Liberals Against Aggression and Militarism (LLAAM), committee meetings, 26 February, 8 and 23 March, 2 and 30 April 1900, Alexander MacCallum Scott Papers, MS GEN 1465/69 (Glasgow University Library). Circular letter of the LLAAM, 17 July 1900, Scott Papers, MS GEN 1465/69. Minutes of the LLAAM, 8 November 1900, Scott Papers, MS GEN 1465/69. Minutes of the LLAAM, 11 January, 22 March and 6 May 1901, Scott Papers, MS GEN 1465/69. ‘National Expenditure and the Growth of Armaments’, issued by the LLAAM, Scott Papers, MS GEN 1465/70. ‘National Reform Union: The Annual Meeting’, 25 February 1902, in Koss, ProBoers, 264.

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T he Conscription Conflict and the Great War

The spur given to anti-imperialist thinking among progressive Liberals could be seen in the flow of books that gushed forth on the war. J. A. Hobson’s The War in South Africa (1900), The Psychology of Jingoism (1901), and Imperialism: A Study (1902) excoriated the imperialist cartels behind the war. Hobhouse’s Democracy and Reaction (1904) argued that the warmakers had put ‘compulsory enlistment’ on the agenda. ‘Thus reaction at home is interwoven with reaction abroad’, warned Hobhouse.60 For Hirst, the message of Hobhouse’s book was blunt: ‘Cobdenites and Socialists should unite to check militarism and imperialism’.61 Fired by the war, Hammond also edited a collection of essays, Liberalism and the Empire (1900). Hirst’s essay in this collection stressed how early in the war Tory warmongers had advocated conscription. In response, true Liberals must agree upon ‘repudiating conscription in all its forms’, and resist the ‘inflation of military establishments to force upon the world [the] indefinite pretensions of race and empire’. 62 Herbert Samuel included a ten-page refutation of the case for conscription in his Liberalism (1902). He prophesied that conscription ‘would be rightly detested by a people whose tenacity of freedom is proved on every page of their history’. Conscription was unjust, an incitement to bellicosity in the people, and life in the barracks was a danger to sexual morality. But notably absent was the argument that conscription was in its very essence a violation of conscience and liberty.63 When the war ended, ‘pro-Boer’ Radicals appealed for greater Liberal consistency in opposing militarism and war.64 But significantly, critics of the war in the Liberal camp had appealed as much to Gladstonian dogma as to the New Liberals’ critique of imperialism. Did the New Liberalism itself buttress resistance conscription? Clearly the experience of combating the Boer War had created a powerful anti-militarist solidarity among progres­ sives, and a conviction that the Liberal Imperialists were a perverse aberration in Liberal ranks. Hobhouse felt this deeply. 65 Once in government, New Liberals frequently linked domestic social reform with peace. For example, Masterman claimed that Lloyd George’s reformist budgets had saved Britain from ‘the twin evils of Conscription and Protection’ that bedevilled the 60 61 62

L. T. Hobhouse, Democracy and Reaction (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1904), 55. Hirst, quoted in Clarke, Liberals and Social Democrats, 72–3. Francis Hirst, ‘Imperialism and Finance’, in J. L. Hammond, ed. Liberalism and the Empire (London: Johnson, 1900), 41. 63 Herbert Samuel, Liberalism (London: Richards, 1902), 369–79. 64 ‘Mr Morley at Newcastle’, The Times, 20 April 1903, 7. 65 Collini, Hobhouse, 82–7.

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Chapter One

Continent.66 But the New Liberal domestic agenda also showed a clear frac­ ture point. In Michael Freeden’s words, the New Liberals ‘had stretched the limits of liberal theory to a point where mutual responsibility, social welfare and common ends had staked claims equal to, and occasionally prior to, the liberty of the individual’.67 This would haunt some New Liberals when the time came to defend ‘the voluntary principle’ in war.

The Balance of Bower in Edwardian Liberalism Who held the reins of the Edwardian Liberal Party – the progressive Liberals, or the Liberal Imperialists? This question exercised countless minds when the Liberals returned to office under Campbell-Bannerman in December 1905. At the outset, it was clear that progressive Liberals, broadly defined, were in the ascendant. Radical critics of the Boer War counted CampbellBannerman as one of their own.68 But the Cabinet he formed was, of course, a compromise. The Gladstonian chiefs of the party, and the Radicals, gained the majority of Cabinet posts. The minister in closest touch with the New Liberalism was Lloyd George. But Campbell-Bannerman also treated the Liberal Imperialists generously. They gained a share in the spoils of high office. The Cabinet of 19 included five ‘Limps’, and the ministry of 45 included 11 altogether. Of those in Cabinet, three held vital posts, Asquith at the Exchequer, Grey at the Foreign Office, and Haldane at the War Office. What of the relative strengths of the two movements in the new parlia­ ment after January 1906? The Liberal Leaguers counted 59 of the 397 Liberal MPs elected as their loyal men, plus at least 11 peers.69 In comparison, the strength of the progressive forces in the new parliament was difficult to gauge, the labels being so slippery. The number of New Liberal MPs (or ‘Social Radicals’) was only between 50 and 60 – roughly comparable with the Liberal Imperialists.70 But taken together, progressive Liberals of all 66 67 68 69

70

Hansard, HC 52: 1044 (29 April 1913). Michael Freeden, Liberalism Divided: A Study in British Political Thought, 1914–1939 (Oxford, Clarendon, 1986), 18. ‘Introduction’, in A. J. A. Morris, ed., Edwardian Radicalism, 1900–1914 (London: Routledge, 1974), 6–7. See varying estimates in Matthew, Liberal Imperialists, 119, and Appendix II, Peter Rowland, The Last Liberal Governments: Unfinished Business, 1911–1914 (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1971), Appendix A, and A. J. A. Morris, Radicalism Against War, 1906–1914: The Advocacy of Peace and Retrenchment (London: Longman, 1972), 20. Robert C. Self, The Evolution of the British Party System, 1885–1940 (Abingdon: Pearson, 2000), 73.

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T he Conscription Conflict and the Great War

kinds eclipsed the ‘Limps’ in sheer numbers.71 In addition, new Quaker MPs stirred to ‘peace testimony’ by the Boer War strengthened the antiwar elements.72 Therefore, between 1906 and 1914, scores of Liberal MPs signed memoranda urging reductions in arms spending. For example, on 4 November 1907, a total of 136 Liberal MPs signed a memorandum urging cuts.73 Fewer actually voted against the surge in arms spending. But as late as December 1913, about 100 progressive Liberals joined a revolt against the Naval Estimates.74 The moment of potential enhanced power for Liberal Imperialism came in April 1908 with the resignation of Campbell-Bannerman. Asquith was appointed Prime Minister, and his key allies, Grey and Haldane, remained in their vital posts. But, paradoxically, the organisation supporting Liberal Imperialism languished. The self-interested trio of powerful ministers did little once in office to nurture the Liberal League. Moreover, Rosebery was hampered by an ‘erratic and petulant waywardness’.75 His resignation as President prompted the League’s dissolution in May 1910.76 Nonetheless, the ‘Limp’ network was vital to the dynamics of the Asquith Cabinet. Three key men, Asquith, Grey and Haldane, had forged friendships and ideological affinities in Rosebery’s circle. The two movements, Liberal Imperialism and progressive Liberalism, existed side-by-side in creative tension – and confusion – within the Asquith government. The numbers of ‘Limps’ were small, but highly placed. The progressives were more numerous, but handicapped by the lack of an out­ standing leader who would stick to anti-militarist principles. As Michael Bentley writes, the Liberals still believed in a common ‘spiritual reservoir’, but it was shallow. Pragmatism dominated, so that it was difficult to pin down ‘anything resembling a Liberal frame of mind’.77 71

Hansen estimates a ‘Radical Liberal’ backbench of ‘around 140’. P. Hansen, ‘The Identification of “Radicals” in the British Parliament, 1906–1914’, The Meijo Review, 4 (2004), 44, and Appendix I. 72 Thomas C. Kennedy, ‘The Quaker Renaissance and the Origins of the Modern British Peace Movement’, Albion, 16 (1984), 243–272. Ten Quaker Liberal MPs were elected in 1906. 73 H. V. Emy, Liberals, Radicals and Social Politics, 1892–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 173. 74 F. W. Wiemann, ‘Lloyd George and the Struggle for the Naval Estimates of 1914’, in A.J.P. Taylor, ed., Lloyd George: Twelve Essays (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1971), 80. 75 Matthew, Liberal Imperialists, 287. 76 Matthew, Liberal Imperialists, 120. 77 Michael Bentley, The Liberal Mind 1914–1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 15.

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Chapter One

Advocates of Compulsion – and the Liberal Party Before turning to the imposition of conscription in 1916, it is important to consider the forces advocating compulsion before the war. The National Service League (NSL), launched in February 1902 was the loudest voice. The founders were mostly Tory figures. Reactionaries from the Tory Party soon dominated. The NSL objective was ‘Universal Military Training for Home Defence’.78 The activism of the wealthy financier and Milnerite, Clinton Dawkins, senior partner at the bank J. S. Morgan Co., and a founder of the ‘Coefficients’, bears mentioning. He funded the NSL’s propaganda.79 Lord Roberts, who took over the presidency in November 1905, proved energetic, and by 1914 the NSL claimed a membership of more than a quarter of a million.80 Leading military officers supported the organisation, including the cantankerous General Sir Henry Wilson.81 Conversions from the ranks of the Liberal Party were few. As Allison argues, the League set out ‘not to change an opinion but to eradicate a prejudice’.82 Only a handful of Liberal MPs were prepared to identify them­ selves as NSL supporters before 1914.83 A few dissenting socialists backed the concept of the ‘citizen army’, but not the Labour Party.84 The NSL’s sister organisations in the Dominions achieved much more. The NSL celebrated when the Liberal government of Sir Joseph Ward introduced compulsory military training in New Zealand in 1909, and when the Labor government of Andrew Fisher followed suit and supported implementation of a similar scheme in Australia in 1911.85 In Britain it was navalism that made in-roads into the Liberal Party. Trad­ itional Liberal attitudes partly explain this. Even Cobden had acknowledged 78

R. J. Q. Adams and Philip P. Poirier, The Conscription Controversy in Great Britain, 1900–18 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1987), 10, and see Michael John Allison, ‘The National Service Issue, 1899–1914’, (PhD thesis, Kings College, London, 1975), 22–3. 79 Lord Newton, Retrospection (London: Murray, 1941), 115, and Kathleen Burk, Morgan Grenfell 1838–1988: The Biography of a Merchant Bank (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 58, 111–3. 80 Matthew Johnson, Militarism and the British Left, 1902–1914 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 93. 81 C. E. Callwell, Field-Marshal Sir Henry Wilson: His Life and Diaries (London: Cassell, 1927), Vol. I, 76–7. 82 Allison, ‘National Service’, 245. 83 See Johnson, Militarism, 31, 97, and Allison, ‘National Service’, 145. 84 Douglas Newton, British Labour, European Socialism, and the Struggle for Peace, 1889–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 208–211, and Ch. 8. 85 Johnson, Militarism, 104.

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that Radicals had ‘an avowed attachment to the Navy as contradistinguished from the Army’, because the navy was not used for ‘repressive purposes’ at home.86 Paul Laity notes that this ‘was a source of weakness in the peace movement’, for Cobdenites believed a strong navy ‘removed the need for a large standing army and for conscription’.87 True believers in the navy as the ‘senior service’ permeated the Asquithian Liberal Party. The Navy League, founded in 1895, vaunted a Westminster membership well beyond that achieved by the NSL: 114 parliamentarians were members by 1908, in­c lud­ing 36 Liberals. 88 By 1914, this number had grown to 48. 89 These Liberal navalists, both moderates and progressives, argued that the big navy saved Britain from dependency upon Russia and France, and therefore made it less likely she would be sucked into a European war.90 Clearly the idea that navalism might save Liberal Britain from militarism was attractive. But, if the dogma of armed preparedness was accepted, and if military emergency could be demonstrated, it was not such a big leap for some to argue that the nation must have the means – both ships and men. Indeed, before 1914 there were signs that leading members of the Asquith government held no absolute convictions against compulsory military training. Even ministers with Radical reputations dropped their guard. In his secret negotiations on the prospect of a Coalition with the Conservatives in 1910, Lloyd George put compulsion on the table. In his Criccieth Memorandum, he wrote that ‘even the question of compulsory training should not be shirked’ – while acknowledging immediately the ‘violent prejudices’ against it.91 Churchill, once promoted to First Lord of the Admiralty, moved in the same direction. Both Lloyd George and Churchill confided to General Wilson in November 1912 that they were ‘in favour of conscription’.92 At Cabinet in April 1913, Churchill challenged Samuel’s assumption that all ministers were opposed to compulsory service, declaring ‘I am not’.93 Haldane, the creator of the Territorial Army Scheme of 1907, and John Seely, his successor at the War Office, both explained to 86 Cobden, quoted in Johnson, Militarism, 84. 87 Paul Laity, The British Peace Movement, 1870–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2002), 129. 88 Johnson, Militarism, 72. 89 Johnson, Militarism, 79, and 88. 90 Johnson, Militarism, 83. 91 See Searle, National Efficiency, Ch. VI, and Scally, Origins, 381. 92 Wilson Diary, 5 November 1912, in Callwell, Wilson, I, 119. 93 Harcourt, Cabinet Memorandum, 9 April 1913, Harcourt Papers (Bodleian Library, Oxford). Italics in original.

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Chapter One

parliament in 1913 that their opposition to compulsory service was based on practical considerations, not principle.94 There were Liberal firebrands who combated the NSL directly. But they were not leading parliamentarians. Walter Runciman and Charles Trevelyan joined forces in a campaign.95 Trevelyan wrote Democracy and Compulsory Service for the Young Liberals in October 1913, condemning the ‘slavery’ of conscription.96 When challenged, he repeated his attacks on the evils of ‘barrack life’ in the House of Commons in April 1914.97 Among the Liberal journalists, Hirst and H. N. Brailsford also concentrated their fire on conscription. For Brailsford, conscription was the foolish project of those bewitched by the Entente.98 The prolific Hirst, editor of The Economist from 1907, bewailed the drift to conscription. As he put it, ‘in the twentieth cen­ tury, the antithesis of the old formula “peace, retrenchment, and reform,” discloses itself as war, protection, and conscription’. Hirst criticised the NSL’s proposed scheme as expensive, an outrage upon British traditions, and a stalking horse for conscription.99

War and the Drift from Principle to Expedience Asquith and Grey’s choice for war in 1914, justified in Grey’s famous speech of Monday 3 August, shook Liberal souls. ‘As to Liberalism, it died last Monday’, Hobhouse wrote to his sister Emily.100 In fact, the whittling away of Liberal principle before the war had been gradual, and the drift toward conscription during the war was gradual too. It took eighteen months for the Asquithians to haul down the flag of ‘Free Service’ – so strong was the presumption among so many Liberal MPs that voluntarism must be given a fair trial. The formation of the Coalition in May 1915 clearly shifted the 94 Johnson, Militarism, 106. 95 A. J. A. Morris, C. P. Trevelyan, 1870–1958: Portrait of a Radical (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1977), 110. 96 C. P. Trevelyan, Democracy and Compulsory Service, Young Liberal Pamphlet, No. 11 (London, 1913). See also, ‘Mr Trevelyan on Peace Men’s Duty’, Manchester Guardian, 28 January 1914, 7. 97 Hansard, HC 61: 1253–60 (23 April 1914). 98 H. N. Brailsford, The War of Steel and Gold (London: Bell, 1914), Ch. 1, ‘The Balance of Power’. 99 For example, Francis Hirst, ‘A New Appeal for Conscription’, ‘Democracy and Reaction’, ‘The Cost of Conscription’, and ‘Compulsory Military Service’, The Economist, 6 February 1909, 15 May 1909, 10 July 1909, and 9 July 1910. 100 L. Hobhouse to E. Hobhouse, 8 August 1914, quoted in Jennifer Balme, To Love One’s Enemies: The Work and Life of Emily Hobhouse (Cobble Hill: Hobhouse Trust, 1994), 544.

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balance of power in the Cabinet. Circumstances assisted the Liberal trim­ mers. Asquith preferred to take incremental steps, first National Registration in August 1915, and then the ‘Derby Scheme’ of ‘attestations’ in October 1915. The repudiation of voluntarism by former Radicals, most notably Lloyd George and Churchill, weakened the progressive forces. Added to this was the noisy campaigning for conscription by the Northcliffe press. Eventually, in January 1916, the Asquith government brought forward a Bill to impose conscription, first upon unmarried men. It was Asquith’s choice. The fact that it was a Liberal-led government’s Bill helped many Liberals to fall into line. Indeed, Liberals were prominent among those agitating for it. Conscription for unmarried men followed in May 1916.101 Dire necessity? Or want of principle? Many Liberal speeches in the Com­ mons exposed the shrivelling of principle.102 On 5 January 1916, Asquith introduced the Military Service Bill. His oratorical deceptions were quite brazen. Luring his Liberal supporters on, he explained that the Bill was not a measure of ‘general compulsion’ – he could never be a party to that. No, this was a limited Bill, ‘confined to a specific purpose’. He was merely redeeming ‘a promise’ he had given to the House on 2 November 1915, namely, that no married men would be ‘dealt with’ before unmarried men. He proposed that single men with ‘no ground whatever for exemption or excuse’ would ‘be treated as though they had attested’. Voluntarism remained – in principle – for married men. Breathtakingly, Asquith explained this was a Bill ‘which can be sincerely supported by those who, either on principle or, as in my case, on grounds of expediency, are opposed to what is commonly described as Conscription’. Moreover, to sweeten the pill, he announced provisions for ‘conscientious objection to undertaking combatant service’. He mentioned Quakers. He then explained that South Africa and Australia had included such exemptions in their legislation on pre-war compulsory military training and service. Indeed, Asquith explained, ‘I think the words we have chosen here are taken from the Colonial Acts’. He urged support for the Bill. ‘Let us keep our promise’, he pleaded, as ‘an obligation of honour’.103 101 R. T. Q. Adams, ‘Asquith’s Choice: the May Coalition and the Coming of Conscription’, Journal of British Studies, 25 (1986), 243–63. 102 In the analysis here, I am indebted to Duncan Marlor’s unpublished book ‘British parliamentary opposition to war and conscription, 1914–1918’, which adds to material in his Fatal Fortnight: Arthur Ponsonby and the Fight for British Neutrality in 1914 (Barnsley: Frontline, 2014). 103 Hansard, HC 77: 949–62 (5 January 1916). See John Rae, Conscience and Politics: The British Government and the Conscientious Objector to Military Service 1916–1919 (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 28–9. The Australian Defence Act (1910), Section 7,

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Chapter One

Sir John Simon, who had just resigned, replied to Asquith. He explained that he spoke for all those ‘who regard this principle of voluntary enlist­ment as a real heritage of the English people’. It was the ‘birthright’ of Britons.104 However, he then debated military needs based on statistics. Some undecided Liberals were not impressed. MacCallum Scott, a sympathetic Radical, had given Simon’s arm ‘a friendly squeeze’ before he began, but he was dis­appoint­ ed by the speech. ‘If he had developed that high argument of principle in a short 15 minutes, John Bright speech, he would have made a powerful impression’, Scott wrote. Instead, ‘Simon missed fire ’. Scott voted with the Ayes.105 Which way did the New Liberal MPs jump on the issue? The answer is – both ways. Percy Alden, a prominent New Liberal, told the House he maintained his ‘lifelong conviction’ that military service must be volun­ tary.106 But Herbert Samuel, Alden’s Rainbow Circle colleague, immediately contradicted him. He explained that he had been persuaded to support the Bill ‘against all my predilections, against my strong bias in favour of voluntary service, by the hard, cold logic of facts’. More men were essential to achieve victory. ‘The War will be ended, in my belief, in no other way.’ And principle? He cast doubt on the ‘very few’ members who appealed to principle. ‘I do not think that one can say that any valid ground of principle ought to prevent a man from supporting this Bill if he regards it as a military necessity for the successful conduct of this War.’ His Liberal conscience was easy: ‘We must give up this much liberty in order to save the rest’, he concluded.107 Similarly, John M. Robertson, a former ‘pro-Boer’ and Rainbow Circler, questioned those resisting conscription on ‘grounds of vital principle’. This was mere ‘sentiment’. The government’s right to impose a ‘levy (sic) en masse’ was ‘an indisputable point of national law and practice’.108 The newly knight­ ed Sir Leo Chiozza Money, formerly an advanced New Liberal, explained he sup­port­ed the Bill, even as ‘a Socialist’. He professed to be amazed that ‘sincere Socialists should see in this War anything which does not really

104 105 106 107 108

clause (i), exempted persons whose ‘conscientious beliefs do not allow them to bear arms.’ The British Act widened the Australian exemption, beyond mere ‘conscientious belief ’, which seemed to specify religious motives, to ‘conscientious objection’. Hansard, HC 77: 962, 974 (5 January 1916). Alexander MacCallum Scott, Diary for 1916, 5 January 1916, Scott Papers, MS GEN 1465/7. Hansard, HC 77: 1180–81 (6 January 1916). Hansard, HC 77: 1156–7 (6 January 1916). Hansard, HC 77: 1149, 1172–3 (6 January 1916).

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accord with their principles’. He refuted the argument that conscription bred militarism, claiming that Australia’s pre-war ‘universal service for home defence’ had not let loose that dragon.109 Some speakers sought to skewer the progressives on the issue of compul­ sion. ‘Every man who joins the State must give up a certain portion of lib­ er­ty in order to get a certain portion of safety for himself. That is the essence of citizen­ship’, Ellis Griffith argued.110 Using this reasoning, Arthur Henderson, speak­ing as Labour’s parliamentary leader, announced his con­ version to conscript­ion. For thirty years, he conceded, trade unionists had ‘never hesitated to apply compulsion whenever they thought the welfare of the State or the welfare of a single class or the welfare of a trade demanded [it]’. Progressives had favoured ‘compulsion on the largest possible scale’. ‘If we have done this to improve the health of the people, to regulate their social habits, to break down the barriers of class, to equalise the distribution of wealth, surely we cannot do less to save the nation.’111 The speech was highly significant. Henderson was under intense pressure at this time, because a special Labour conference had just declared against conscription, recom­ mend­ing Labour’s withdrawal from the government. But soon after, Asquith and Henderson successfully negotiated away Labour’s threat of resignation.112 On the other side of the debate, a small number of Liberals spoke of irreducible Liberal principles. Richard Holt, a moderate Liberal, built his case ‘on the ground of principle’. He argued that ‘the State has no right to require any citizen to run the risk of losing his life or the risk of kill­ ing another man under circumstances which do not commend themselves to his conscience’. Holt appealed to absolute moral values – and to their limits. Seeking volunteers was ‘the limit of the power of the majority in any country to carry on a war’. It was always wrong to compel any man ‘to fight in a quarrel which he thinks wrong’. Conscription would besmirch the supposed ‘great war for freedom, liberty, and justice in Europe’.113 Percy Molteno, a Radical of South African background, also leapt to the defence of ‘fundamental liberties’. Magna Carta and the Petition of Right, he argued, established clear principles on military service. ‘Those principles were that no one should be placed under military law without his consent for 109 110 111 112

Hansard, HC 77: 1530–9 (11 January 1916). Hansard, HC 77: 1626 (12 January 1916). Hansard, HC 77: 1733 (12 January 1916). Malcolm I. Thomis, ‘Conscription and Consent: British Labour and the Resignation Threat of January 1916’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 23 (1977), 10–18. 113 Hansard, HC 77: 1229–30 (6 January 1916).

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Chapter One

foreign service’. Liberals could not ‘abrogate those fundamental liberties’. Never had parliament allowed pressed troops to be deployed abroad, argued Molteno. The Liberal government’s own Territorial and Reserve Forces Act of 1907 had given the same guarantee – no forced foreign service – a ‘pledge’ superior to any ‘promise’ given by Asquith. Molteno choked on the injustice of conscription. Those urging conscription, he argued, were saying to the young, ‘We shall take from you all your capital – that is your labour and your time’. How could Liberals do this? ‘We have no organised Liberal Government in Power’, Molteno ruefully concluded.114 Another Radical to appeal to indefeasible rights was Richard Lambert. Britain’s war had been declared ‘on principle, for principle’, and yet ‘we are asked, in the sacred name of war, to throw over all these principles’. He defined them: The principle underlying voluntary service is that a man shall have liberty of conscience, freedom of action, freedom to bestow his labour where he will, and you are interfering with all these. In the course of this War, liberty of trade – Free Trade – has gone. Where is freedom of speech to-day? … and now we are asked to take away freedom of the person as well. What is there left? 115

By this time, the New Liberal intellectuals, Hobhouse, Hobson, and C. P. Scott, were tormented by these same questions. They lamented the resort to conscription.116 Masterman, the government’s chief war propagandist, priv­ ately agonised.117 The creators of the New Liberalism realised it had proven to be no fortress against conscription. The 28 dissenting Liberals who voted against conscription in January 1916 were mostly Gladstonian Radicals. Highprofile New Liberals, such as Lloyd George, Samuel, Murray Macdonald, J. M. Robertson, Christopher Addison, and Walter Runciman voted for it.118 In their cups, Hobhouse and Scott were even inclined to concede that some brand of ‘Prussianism’ was probably irresistible, because both believed that victory was indispensable and, therefore, both shunned a negotiated peace.119 114 Hansard, HC 77: 1540–51 (11 January 1916). 115 Hansard, HC 77: 1469 (11 January 1916). 116 Freeden, Liberalism Divided, 20–26. 117 Mulvey, Wedgwood, 63. 118 Hansard, HC 77: 1739 (12 January 1916). 119 See Peter Weiler, ‘The New Liberalism of L. T. Hobhouse’, Victorian Studies, 16 (1972), 159; and Harold Smith, ‘World War I and British Left Wing Intellectuals: The Case of Leonard T. Hobhouse’, Albion, 5 (1973), 267.

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T he Conscription Conflict and the Great War

Finally there is a significant continuity in this tale – the activism of men of property. In January 1916, Liberal supporters of conscription at the House of Commons formed a ‘Liberal War Committee’.120 Its key activists brought great riches to the new committee, just as Dawkins had brought great riches to fund the NSL in 1902. When MacCallum Scott first attended the committee, he wrote in his diary of ‘the enormous wealth behind it’. ‘I prophesy’, he continued, ‘that this committee will aim at capturing the Lib­ eral machine, and will probably do it. Asquith will be strangled by treason within his own party.’121 Indeed, the Liberal War Committee rallied support for the first instalment of conscription, and the second, four months later. The strangling took longer.

Conclusion War is the pasture of bigots, and the solvent of principle. But the Liberal Party’s time-honoured principles dissolved not only in the storm-surge of war. Liberal articles of faith were at a discount among Liberal Imperialists before the war. New Liberalism had rejuvenated Liberal ideology, and the campaign against the Boer War had energised the advanced wing of the Liberal Party. But the forces of Radical Liberalism and Liberal Imperial­ ism were locked in unresolved tension in the Edwardian Liberal Party. The ‘Limps’ had never anathematised conscription. In Asquith’s government, they held the key top posts. The New Liberals and Radicals, when united, were still strong – and right up to 1914 progressive critics of Grey’s ‘policy of the Entente’ were in a majority in Asquith’s Cabinet.122 But the pre-war defection of Lloyd George and Churchill, from the progressive majority to the Liberal Imperialist minority, hobbled the anti-militarist cause. As belief in the ‘German menace’ spread, and as navalism permeated the Liberal Party, anti-militarist convictions were shaken. These pre-war developments foreshadowed the victory of pragmatism over principle on the key issue – conscription. For some New Liberals, the advocacy of compulsion for the common good easily translated into advocacy of compulsion for the common defence. 120 Matthew Johnson, ‘The Liberal War Committee and Liberal Advocacy of Conscription in Britain, 1914–1916’, The Historical Journal, 51 (2008), 399–420. 121 MacCallum Scott, Diary for 1916, 13 January 1916, Scott Papers, MS GEN 1465/7. 122 See ‘Parties in the Cabinet’, by H. W. Temperley, 1928, Temperley to Spender, 1 Jan. 1928, Spender Papers, Add. MSS. 46386. (British Library).

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Chapter One

War exposed the fragility of principle in the Liberal Party. Indeed, the Asquith government’s flow of concessions to authoritarianism was steady, from the heavy-handed Defence of the Realm Acts to the censorship at the War Office Press Bureau. John Simon had warned in 1914 that a coalition with the Tories would be ‘the grave of Liberalism’.123 Certainly the formation of the Coalition in May 1915 brought gravediggers to the Cabinet table. More concessions followed: the manpower controls of the Munitions of War Act; raids against the Union of Democratic Control and the Independent Labour Party; the historic turn toward protectionism through the ‘McKenna Duties’; and the suppression of labour dissent, especially on the Clyde. As Lord Loreburn told Ramsay MacDonald in November 1915, ‘Liberalism as I have followed it and believed in it for a lifetime is now dissolving in the crucible’.124 Asquith himself spoke dismissively of Liberal principles. On 2 November 1915, he assured the Commons that he had ‘no abstract or a priori objection of any sort or kind to compulsion – in time of war’. He gently mocked those who held religious objections to conscription: ‘I have nothing at the back of my mind which would make me go to the stake, or through some less severe form of penance, in defence of what is called the voluntary principle.’ Such ‘predilections’ as Asquith characterised them, were dispensable. ‘It is a pure question of practical expediency – how are we going to bring the war to a successful conclusion?’125 Similarly, Lloyd George sneered at appeals to principle when he put the case to the Commons for extending conscription to married men in May 1916. He claimed that ‘every great democracy’ had resorted to compulsion in war, from the French Revolution to the American Civil War. He angrily refuted the accusation that he was ‘a traitor to Liberal principles’. ‘Where is the principle?’ He asked repeatedly. ‘I cannot find it … I want to find it … I have not heard it yet, not once.’ Those Liberals who condemned conscription as ‘contrary to the principles of liberty or true democracy’ were ‘talking in defiance of the whole teaching of history and of common sense’.126 The next speaker on his feet was the Scottish Radical, William Pringle. Where had Lloyd George learned his ‘revised version of the gospel of Liberalism and democracy?’ Pringle asked. Certainly not from ‘the old master of Liberalism 123 Christopher Addison, Four and a Half Years (London: Hutchinson, 1934), I, 35. 124 Loreburn to MacDonald, 16 November 1915, Ramsay MacDonald Papers, PRO 30/69/1159 (The National Archives). 125 Hansard, HC 75: 520–4 (2 November 1915). 126 Hansard, HC 82: 175–84 (4 May 1916).

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T he Conscription Conflict and the Great War

in this House, Mr Gladstone’. The idea that military compulsion could be reconciled with Liberalism and democracy was ‘beneath contempt’.127 But when the vote was taken, conscription triumphed 328 votes to 36, with only 28 Liberals once again in opposition.128 Thus, it was Britain’s Liberal-led government that imposed general con­ scription. As a result, eventually more than half of the 4,970,000 British soldiers sent into combat during the Great War were sent as conscripts.129 ‘Continental Despotism’ had crossed the Channel. British Liberalism at war had proved to be an anaemic thing.

127 Hansard, HC 82: 185–94 (4 May 1916). 128 Hansard, HC 82: 265–7 (4 May 1916). 129 War Office, Statistics on the Military Effort of the British Empire during the Great War, 1914–1920 (London: HMSO, 1922), 363–4.

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Cha pte r Tw o

L A BOU R A N D L I BER T Y The Origins of the Conscription Referendum Robin Archer

The 1916 conscription referendum was the most remarkable event that took place in Australia during the First World War. Nothing like it occurred in any of the other belligerents. Indeed, nothing like it had ever occurred anywhere before. The referendum campaign and those who participated in it have rightly been a focus of scholarship. But there is a prior question. Why was the decision taken to hold a referendum in the first place? The short answer is one of parliamentary arithmetic. Prime Minister Hughes was unable to convince a majority of Labor MPs, or even a majority of his own cabinet, to support the introduction of conscription. And Labor’s supermajority in the Senate (where it held 31 of 36 seats) precluded the possibility of either enacting conscription through legislation or introducing it by regulation under the War Precautions Act, since even with the support of opposition Liberal MPs, the Prime Minister could not command a pro-conscription majority there. Hughes was thus forced to fall back on a referendum as offering the best chance of getting his way.1 But why did so many Labor parliamentarians refuse to support the intro­ duction of conscription and what were the arguments within the broader labour movement that informed their decisions? In this chapter I will take that question as my starting point. I will begin by examining the role of 1

Robin Archer, ‘Stopping War and Stopping Conscription: Australian Labour’s Response to World War I in Comparative Perspective’, in Labour and the Great War, eds Frank Bongiorno, Raelene Frances and Bruce Scates, special issue, Labour History, no. 106 (2014): 57–9, 64–6.

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T he Conscription Conflict and the Great War

liberty-based arguments in motivating opposition to conscription, and will end by trying to pre-empt some possible criticisms of my account. I will focus on labour movement opposition to conscription in the period prior to the decision to hold a referendum. Labour was not the only source of opposition. Christian pacifists, socialist internationalists, and feminists were also involved. But labour was by far the most important source of opposition. And it is the opposition of labour’s representatives in parliament that is central to explaining why a referendum was held. I will pay close attention to the period after the outbreak of the war, and especially to the twelve months or so prior to the decision to hold a referendum. But I will also examine earlier debates that bear on labour’s attitude to conscription. My evidence is drawn from a careful reading of a wide range of sources. The sources include the labour press, especially the main Sydney and Melbourne based papers and the most important socialist paper 2 ; the minutes of key state and federal party and union meetings; the record of Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates; the speeches of important opinion formers; the private papers and correspondence of politicians, trade union leaders and other activists; contemporary publications, pamphlets and cam­ paign literature; the memoirs of major protagonists; and earlier scholarly research. 2

The Sydney-based Australian Worker (AW) was arguably the single most important source. It was the best edited and most widely read organ of the labour press. It was also the paper of the Australian Workers Union (AWU), which was central in fostering acceptance of an unequivocal anti-conscription stance. The AWU led the way in condemning the prospect of conscription, and its officials and activists played a leading role in promoting anti-conscription resolutions in the central party and union organisations of the major eastern states as well as in Australia-wide congresses. The paper’s editor, Henry Boote, was the single most important anti-conscription ideas merchant. On this see Boote papers, National Library of Australia (NLA), MS 2070/1/396–7, 3 June 1958, and Thomas J. Miller, Some Reflections (Melbourne: Ruskin Press, 1938). On how he helped shape the ideas of even some of the most highly articulate opponents see MHR Frank Brennan in Boote papers, NLA, MS 2070/1/40, 30 December 1917. The Melbourne-based Labor Call (LC) was also very important. It both reflected and influenced the thinking of the Melbourne Trades Hall Council (THC). And its location placed it at the heart of the labour movement in Victoria which, in part because of its proximity to the federal parliament, was at the centre of the conscription conflict both ideologically and organisationally. The THC Secretary, E.J. Holloway, who was also the President of the Victorian Political Labor Council, was probably the most influential party and union official at the time. The Socialist was the paper of the Victorian Socialist Party (VSP) which exercised significant influence on the labour movement. Its activists and those close to it were important early opponents of conscription. And its leaders, especially Robert Ross, fostered cooperation with Christian dissidents and brought secular and religious opponents together in common organisations like the No Conscription Fellowship and the Australian Peace Alliance.

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Chapter Two

A brief overview of events may help to orient the discussion that follows. Concerns about conscription were present from the outset of the war.3 In­ deed, these concerns had been central to a vigorous debate about compulsory military training before the war. However, debate on conscription stilled in the war’s opening months, partly because the government had more volunteers than it could manage and partly because Prime Minister Fisher maintained a public stance that there should be ‘no urging of any compulsion of any kind’.4 The War Census Bill of July 1915, which sought to produce a register of all 18 to 50 year old men able and willing to fight, along with a register of the income and wealth of the whole population, reignited concern. Fisher, Hughes and the leaders of the opposition all denied that it was a prelude to conscription, and the federal Parliamentary Labor Party (PLP) caucus endorsed it on the basis of these assurances.5 In late 1915 and early 1916 a series of developments took place that even­ tually made conscription the all-consuming focus of public life. The initial stimulus was provided by the establishment of the Universal Service League (USL) in September 1915 – close on the heels of a similar initiative in Britain – to push the government to introduce conscription. Within days, a trade union based Anti-Conscription League was established, which was likewise influenced by the decision of British counterparts. A union delegation on 24 September received some reassurance from Prime Minister Fisher, who told them that he was ‘irrevocably opposed to conscription and he was sure he could say his colleagues were’.6 But by the end of October, Fisher had resigned in ill health to take up the position of High Commissioner in London and William Morris Hughes had become Prime Minister. Hughes’ long record as one of the principle proponents of compulsory military training and both his and Defence Minister Pearce’s increasingly ambiguous statements led to growing concern about his intentions. On 16 January 1916, Hughes left Australia for London via New Zealand, Canada and the United States. He reached an agreement with the USL and 3 4 5 6

Even as it advocated Australian entry into the war, an editorial in the Queensland Worker on 6 August 1914 felt it necessary to add that ‘No man can be compelled to leave this own shores to fight. That fact stands out too plainly to be overlooked.’ Sydney Morning Herald, 1 April 1915. Patrick Weller, ed., Caucus Minutes 1901–1949, Volume 1 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1975), 412–13; Neville Meaney, Australia and the World Crisis 1914–1923 (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2009), 47. K.S. Inglis, ‘Conscription in Peace and War, 1911–1945’ in Conscription in Australia, eds Roy Forward and Bob Reece (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1968), 32.

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T he Conscription Conflict and the Great War

the Liberal Party Opposition to desist from pressing their campaign until his return. But the British government’s decision to introduce conscription in January 1916 and to expand it in May, along with Hughes’ increasingly strident rhetoric and supporters in London, heated the debate still further. Between January and May, a series of central trade union and Labor Party organisations voted to condemn conscription and renewed initiatives in April and May by the Opposition and the USL brought the conflict to fever pitch before Hughes returned to Australia on 31 July 1916. Despite mounting pressure and expectation, and public rallies around the country, Hughes held his counsel until 30 August, when, after the closest of votes in the Cabinet and Caucus, he announced his plan to hold a referendum.7 Attention then moved to parliament, where, after a lengthy debate, a bill to hold the referendum was passed in late September. The referendum was set for 28 October 1916.

Liberal Arguments So why was there such widespread hostility to conscription in the labour movement? Multiple arguments were invoked. Geographical and militarystrategic considerations, differing assessments of the risks facing Australia, differing assessments of how Australians could best help Britain, partisan interests, racial anxieties, nationalist reasoning, religious sectarianism, con­ cerns about economic development, concerns about the equitable distribution of sacrifices both between different classes of Australians and between Australia and other allies, concerns about the potential threats to unionism and social progress, considerations of class advantage, concerns about the ulterior motives of conscriptionists, and various ad hominem arguments all played a role. But here I want to suggest that liberal arguments were central to how labour anti-conscriptionists understood their opposition. 7

On the build-up of the conscription conflict from late 1915 onwards, see: Joan Beaumont, ‘The Politics of a Divided Society’ in Australia’s War 1914–1918, ed. Joan Beaumont (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1995), 43–6; E.J. Holloway, The Australian Victory over Conscription in 1916–1918 (Melbourne: Anti-Conscription Jubilee Committee, 1966), 3–5; Inglis, ‘Conscription in War and Peace, 1911–1945’,31–4; Meaney, Australia and the World Crisis 1914–1923, 43–55, 158–9; Ian Turner, Industrial and Labour Politics: The Dynamics of the Labour Movement in Eastern Australia 1900–1921 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1965), 98–101; Ernest Scott, The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, Volume XI Australia During the Great War (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1936), 333–6; F.B. Smith, The Conscription Plebiscites in Australia, 1916–17 (Melbourne: Victorian Historical Association, 1965), 5–10.

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There are good prima facie reasons to think that this might be so. After all, it was the strength of this liberal tradition in the English-speaking countries – both in the realm of ideas and in the institutional settlement between state and society inherited from the nineteenth century – that had made conscription anathema to many and had left these countries, uniquely among the belligerents, without conscription at the outset of the war. This tradition saw militarism as the antithesis of a free society and conscription as the paradigm characteristic of militarism. These ideas were closely associ­ ated with radical liberalism. But they were not exclusive to it. Rather, they overlapped with the arguments of international socialists and Christian pacifists. Socialism had grown out of the radical wing of the liberal tradition, just as Christian dissent had fed into it. As I hope to show, the evidence suggests that Australia’s politically precocious labour movement had drunk deeply at the well of this liberal tradition. Liberal arguments were the centerpiece of labour’s objection to con­ scription from the outset. They were central to the response to the War Census Bill in July 1915. ‘Many – very many – people are fearful that the Bill is but the prelude to the introduction of [conscription] … the traditional and implacable foe of Democracy, of social reform, and of peoples rightly struggling to be free’ argued Labor Call.8 They were central to the wave of comments provoked by the introduction of conscription in Britain in January 1916. ‘An outrage on liberty’ is how the Australian Worker summarised its response in a lead article.9 And they were central to the calls in April 1916 for labour organisations to ‘speak out’ on the ‘danger of military compul­ sion’.10 ‘THE ENEMIES OF FREEDOM ARE AT WORK’, warned the Australian Worker, ‘there is no question of greater importance than this. It goes to the very sources of our being. Are we free men? Or are we slaves?’11 Liberal concerns were also at the heart of the arguments put forward by the movers of the critical anti-conscription resolutions adopted in April and May 1916 by the Victorian Political Labor Council (PLC), the NSW Political Labor League (PLL), and the special All Australia Trade Union 8 9 10 11

LC, 29 July 1915, inside cover. AW, 13 January 1916, 1 AW, 20 April 1916, 1. AW, 27, April 1916, 1. Capitals in the original. For similar sentiments in Labor Call, 27 April 1916, 6–7, see Wallis’ lead article ‘War and Freedom’ and the featured letter in the same issue that argued that ‘the little liberty we have is worth fighting for. … Once conscription becomes the law of the land, your liberty has gone forever’.

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T he Conscription Conflict and the Great War

Congress on Conscription (AATUCC), which sealed in place labour’s op­ position in the key eastern states. The opening speakers at the Victorian PLC set out standard liberal arguments for the protection of individual freedom from the power of the state. Delegate Hogan argued that while ‘the State should have great powers to do things for the general welfare of the community, there was a stage when those powers should cease. That stage was reached when the state sought to physically seize, as it were, the manhood of the country and interfere with individual liberty.’ Delegate Carey agreed. ‘As Laborites’, he argued, they should say that ‘the State should not have supreme power over a man’s life and liberty. A man dragged to war against his own beliefs would be in the position of one unwillingly filling the position of hangman.’12 Delegate Rae, who moved the successful resolution against conscription at the NSW PLL, argued in a similar fashion. His starting point was that ‘compulsory service abroad was a policy that no democracy should tolerate’ and that ‘the sacredness of human life was above and beyond everything’. And he ended with a call ‘to join together with their brothers in this continent … [to] preserve the measure of liberty they had obtained’. Other anti-conscriptionist delegates made similar arguments. According to dele­ gate Rosa, conscription ‘was one of the most odious forms of human slavery’. And according to delegate Mutch, ‘they were already getting a taste of military rule’, and ‘the last remnant of our liberties’ were at stake. The issue was so fundamental, he added, that if the resolution were not passed, he would have to resign from the party’s federal executive.13 At the All Australian Trade Union Congress on Conscription (AATUCC), Delegate McNeill moved the main motion. McNeill had also been centrally involved in crafting the final resolution agreed at the Victorian PLC. Now he included his basic reasoning in the body of the motion. ‘Society has not given to its members their individual lives’, he argued, ‘but only assures to the individual his preservation, and in a highly organised democratic state of society the full advantage of civilisation which social organisation has developed through human history. Therefore, the State ethically has no prerogative to constrain any of its citizens to sacrifice their lives for any 12

13

LC, 4 May 1916, 9–10. The particular motion that Hogan put forward was not carried. But this was not because of its general opposition to conscription, which was later emphatically endorsed with just one dissentient, but because of the desire of the delegates to more emphatically assert themselves with respect to their parliamentary representatives. AW, 11 May 1916, 19.

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Chapter Two

cause …’ The next day, McNeill withdrew his lengthy motion – it was, said one delegate, ‘not so much a motion as an essay’ – in favour of a slimmed down but equally emphatic version. But there is no suggestion that his basic moral reasoning had been rejected. McNeill’s new resolution passed 258,018 votes to 753.14 These liberal themes remained central thereafter. They featured prom­ in­ently in public meetings both before and after the return of Hughes. Before his return, a large meeting of some 5,000 labour, union, and socialist activists organised by T.J. Millar of the Australian Freedom League was held in the Sydney domain under the banner ‘Conscription is Slavery’. And a huge meeting of perhaps 100,000 was organised there by the NSW PLL to press the point after his return. Three speakers managed to complete their comments before soldiers disrupted the meeting. Each argued that to ‘preserve the democracy of Australia’ and ‘retain our liberties’ conscription of life must be rejected.15 These themes continued to be prominent after Hughes announced his intention of holding a referendum. Frank Brennan argued in the House of Representatives that it would be ‘an act of coercion and oppression exercised against the hitherto free people of this country’.16 The Barrier Truth argued that ‘amid many minor objections to ‘conscription’ is the supreme one that it outrages the personal liberty of the individual’.17 And according to E.J. Holloway, who was arguably the most powerful Labor Party and union official in the country, the situation could be summarised as follows: ‘The great test has come … We must choose between Freedom and Slavery. If we would be Free, then we must fight to the last gasp against the introduction of conscription in Australia.’18 And they remained prominent in the final manifestos issued on the eve of the referendum. The Victorian PLC manifesto began and ended with liberal arguments. ‘In the name of Labor of Liberty of Conscience and 14 15

16 17 18

Australian Trade Union Congress (AATUCC), Australian Trade Unionism and Conscription being Report of Proceedings (Melbourne: Labor Call Print, 1916), 11–3. AW, 22 June 1916, 6 and 17 August 1916, 15. There were similar themes at public meeting in Melbourne. A meeting of several thousand at the Yarra Bank ended with cheers ‘for the cause of freedom’ (LC, 17 August 1916, 10) and some 10,000 people at a meeting organised by the Melbourne THC at the Yarra bank heard speakers address similar themes, notably in the comments of E.J. Holloway; AW, 7 September 1916, 15. LC, 21 September 1916, 8. Reprinted in LC, 14 September 1916, 7. LC, 14 September 1916, 9.

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T he Conscription Conflict and the Great War

of our common humanity’, it concluded, ‘we urge you to answer No’.19 The NSW PLL Executive’s manifesto likewise ended with a ringing liberal cry.20 The PLL had asked Boote to write this manifesto, 21 which gives a good feeling of the extent to which his position had been embraced by the labour move­ment as a whole. Private correspondence from both opponents and supporters of conscrip­ tion helps to confirm the importance of these liberal arguments. Andrew Fisher’s papers are particularly interesting in this respect. The former Prime Minister’s longstanding personal connections with key individuals, their confidence in his trustworthiness, and the fact that he was now out of politics and a long way away, combined to induce a frank sometimes confessional tone in his correspondents. In addition, Fisher was an assiduous correspondent who repeatedly asked his friends and former colleagues for information on the political situation in Australia. Writing privately to Fisher in London on 14 February 1916, Senator Albert Gardiner, who sat in Hughes’ ten-man Cabinet as Assistant Minister for Defence, noted that there was ‘a distinct growth in public opinion towards conscription’. But he thought that those against compulsory service ‘are our men mostly stalwarts with vague, perhaps crude ideas of liberty but they will stand firm and go out fighting’.22 Another such ‘Private and Personal’ letter, from Federal Treasurer Higgs on the eve of the crucial Caucus meeting, shows how these arguments were affecting individual decisions at the highest level. Despite being the target of a hostile campaign from the labour press about the government’s emollient attitude towards the wealthy, he tells Fisher privately that ‘I shall vote against conscription in the Cabinet and the Caucus … I can’t bring myself to vote for compelling any man to go abroad to fight against his will …’23 Indeed, in a private cable dated 21 September 1916 seeking endorsement of conscription from French labour leaders, Hughes himself implicitly acknowledges that 19 Holloway, The Australian Victory over Conscription in 1916–1918, 8–10. 20 See AW, 26 October 1916, 5 (as well as the torch cartoon and poem on 11 and ‘Free’ cartoon on 9). 21 M.E. Lloyd, Sidelights on Two Referendums 1916–1917 (Sydney: William Brooks and Co, n.d.), 56–7. 22 Fisher papers, NLA MS 2919/1/195, 14 February 1916. Underlining in original. At this stage he estimated that about twenty per cent of the public were opposed. 23 Fisher papers, NLA MS 2919/1/233, 23 August 1916. Higgs had said the same thing in a letter to Hughes a few days earlier on 12 August 1916. See L.F. Fitzhardinge, The Little Digger, 1914–1952: William Morris Hughes, A Political Biography Vol II (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1979), 177; and Higgs anonymous note to Boote in Lloyd, Sidelights on Two Referendums 1916–1917, 58.

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Chapter Two

the allegation that ‘Compulsory service violates principles of democratic gov­ ernment and is a menace to liberty’ lies at the heart of his opponents’ case.24

Industrial Freedom Labour anti-conscriptionists regularly tied the argument about the effect of conscription on liberty in general to an argument about its effect on the freedom of workers in particular. Conscription would, they said, lead to the militarisation of the workplace, weakening unions and reversing their gains. This would come about, they feared, through the introduction of industrial conscription, which seemed to be justified by the same kind of arguments about the efficient prosecution of the war that were used to support the case for military conscription. They foresaw a system of compulsory industrial service – in effect a new kind of serfdom – in which workers would be allocated to jobs and their pay and conditions determined by military authorities or employers acting with the authority of the military.25 They also feared that conscripts would be used against strikers, either to suppress them or to take their place.26 And they feared that the threat of military con­scription would be used to intimidate union activists and silence others raising questions in the workplace. These concerns were not conjured out of thin air. On the contrary, they were regularly stoked by the same people who began the campaign to press for military conscription. What was needed, argued a leading British pro­ ponent, was ‘an authoritative order telling every man in which battalion he had to serve or in what factory he had to work’.27 And similar goals were adopted by both the British National Service League and the Australian Universal Service League in August and September 1915. Their object, said the USL’s manifesto, was ‘to compel every citizen, man or woman, to render whatever kind of service, military or otherwise, in or out of Australia, he or she may be considered capable of ’ – a cry that was then taken up by the Australian Natives Association and various manufacturers, among others.28 24 25 26

Fisher papers, NLA MS 2919/1/249, 21 September 1916. See, for example, AW, 20 April 1916, 1. This fear predated the war. See Senator Rae’s concerns in LC, 7 May 1914, 5 and the report on Switzerland in LC, 25 June 1914, cover. 27 Meaney, Australia and the World Crisis 1914–1923, 49. 28 Ibid., 50–51; Scott, The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, 334; Riley Papers, NLA MS 759, Box 52, folder 7, NCF Flyer. Moreover such proposals were considered by the Asquith government, and promoted by leading conservatives. See: Joan Beaumont, Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War (Sydney: Allen

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T he Conscription Conflict and the Great War

Labour movement concern about industrial conscription was expressed early in the debate about conscription and continued through to the day of the referendum. ‘Vote Against Conscription and Industrial Slavery’ ran a banner heading in the Labor Call throughout October, culminating in a front page cartoon of the devil Hughes tempting labour to step into the flaming sea of ‘industrial conscription’. 29 The fear of industrial conscription was particularly prominent in union opposition to conscription, though it was also present in Labor Party debates.30 And anti-conscriptionists regularly invoked the experience of unionists overseas, including those in more liberal societies like Britain and France.31 These labour anti-conscriptionists linked the argument about freedom with an argument about class. But this was not some newly convenient innovation. Rather it flowed from general shifts in the interpretation of liberalism associated with the emergence of the ‘New Liberalism’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.32 The New Liberalism maintained that real individual freedom required strong unions, welfare protections, and greater state intervention in the economy. These social liberal ideas had exerted an influence on the British Liberal government that had been first elected in 1906. But they had been particularly influential in Australia 33 where they helped underwrite both the pre-war social experimentation that so fascinated outside observers and the coalition of Labor and Deakinite liberals that had entrenched these experiments. After the fusion of the Deakinite liberals with their erstwhile Free Trade opponents in 1909, Labor, always an important repository of New Liberal ideas, increasingly became the main repository of them.

29 30 31 32 33

and Unwin, 2013), 220; and R.J.Q. Adams and Philip P. Poirier, The Conscription Controversy in Great Britain, 1900–18 (London: Macmillan, 1987), 86. In June 1915, Lloyd George, now working with conservatives to introduce conscription, advocated ‘the right of the state to direct labour wherever it saw fit’; G.R. Searle, A New England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 685. LC, 5 October 1916, 11; LC, 12 October 1916, 11; LC, 19 October 1916, 11; and LC, 26 October 1916, 1 & 11. See the report of the debate at the Australian Trade Union Anti-Conscription Congress in Melbourne (1916) and at the Interstate TUC in Hobart in AW, 25 May 1916, 15. On party debates see, for example, Rae at NSW PLL in AW, 11 May 1916, 19. On Britain, see for example AW, 6 January 1916, 1, and especially, AW, 3 February 1916, 1 ‘Chain Gang Labor’. On France, see AW, 13 January 1916, 1 and especially, AW, 6 July 1916, 1, ‘A Warning From France’. On both see AW, 25 May 1916, 5. Michael Freeden, New Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), L.T. Hobhouse, Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1911). Marian Sawer, The Ethical State? Social Liberalism in Australia (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2003).

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Chapter Two

Some pro-conscriptionists criticised their opponents for inconsistency. Did not unions themselves support compulsion when they sought a closed shop? This was a criticism Hughes was himself fond of making (well before he came out publicly in favour of conscription) and it was taken up by a number of unionists.34 More generally, did not conscription prefigure the kind of society that socialists were seeking to build – a society organised by the state in the interests of equity and efficiency? Criticisms like this were taken up by the veteran unionist and Labor politician J.D. Fitzgerald at the NSW PLL.35 But the dominant response within the labour movement was that both of these criticisms were misconceived. They were, according to Boote, shal­ low and specious arguments. ‘The suggestion that because compulsion is justifiable in certain circumstances it must be just and proper under other cir­cum­stances, totally different, is worthy only of a Cheap Jack logician. To offer it to intelligent men and women is little short of an affront.’36 In fact, he argued, ‘Conscription and unionism … are absolutely irreconcilable. Unionism aims at the emancipation of the working class. Conscription in­ stills the virus of subservience to the Boss.’37 The suggestion that unionism had an affinity with conscription rested on a ‘false analogy’ between the nation-state and a union.38 The idea that conscription prefigured socialism was likewise dismissed with striking passion and vigour. ‘If that were true’, wrote Boote, this paper [the Worker] would publicly recant its Socialism and make a hurried bonfire of the Labor platform. But it is not true … Socialism will FREE men, not enslave them. It will liberate their power to will, so that they can choose their own paths, and achieve their own 34 35 36 37 38

For Hughes see AW, 13 January 1916, 1. See also O’Brien in AW, 13 January 1916, 18, Vivash in AW, 11 May 1916, 18, and D.H. Newman, “Yes” Points For Socialists (Melbourne: Specialty Press, 1916), 6. For Fitzgerald see AW, 11 May 1916, 19. See also D.H. Newman, The Socialist Case for Conscription (Melbourne: Specialty Press, 1916). AW, 13 January 1916, 1. AW, 6 January 1916, 1. AW, 3 February 1916, 15, and AW, 1 June 1916, 15. Boote’s argument depended, in part, on the capitalist nature of the existing nation-state. Yet even in a socialist state, he argued, conscription would be subject to the ‘fundamental objection’ that going to war ‘is for [each man’s] own conscience to decide.’ For different arguments against this false analogy that emphasized the need for democratic control or equally shared benefits or both see: Tyme in AW, 1June 1916, 19; Ferricks in LC, 8 June 1916, 5; and Cassidy in the Queensland Worker reprinted in LC, 10 August 1916, 7. For an argument against any analogy with compulsory schooling, see LC, 12 October 1916, 11.

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T he Conscription Conflict and the Great War destinies. It will not say to anyone, ‘You shall be something you do not want to be; something you hate to be. And if you resist, you shall be put in jail, or stood against a wall and shot!’. That is Conscription. If it were Socialism, too, then as a lover of liberty this paper would curse the Labor Movement from dawn till dark and dream of it in sleep as a hideous nightmare … The essence of Unionism, as of Socialism, is not compulsion, but freedom. The culmination of its aims would be more liberty for the individual – fewer restraints upon the expression and development of his personal equation.39

This argument was not just some eccentricity of Boote’s. It was funda­ mental to a great deal of socialist reasoning in the English-speaking world and beyond. The argument that the basic purpose of socialism was the development of individual freedom was made even more emphatically in the Labor Call before the debate on conscription had even begun. The paper reproduced at length Oscar Wilde’s argument that ‘all individualists who are not Socialists are fools’, while ‘the Socialist who understands his faith, is an individualist’.40 Similar arguments were made in the Socialist. An article on ‘Socialism and Individualism’ concluded that ‘socialism is at one with true individualism’.41 The New Liberalism provided a well-established rationale for dis­tin­ guishing between different grounds for exercising the authority of the state. It offered support for state and union interventions in the organisation of the economy and especially the labour market that would strengthen the weak in their relations with the strong and hence give them meaningful options and an element of real freedom. But this did not entail support for the use of state authority in ways that would further weaken the weak at the behest of the strong by placing workers under a regime of military discipline or by joining the authority of employers with the military authority of the state. Though there was no one-to-one correspondence, British New Liberals were disproportionately likely to oppose the introduction of conscription.42 39 40 41 42

AW, 13 January 1916, 1. For a different criticism emphasizing the difference between international socialism and Blatchford-style national socialism, see Tyme in AW, 13 January 1916, 16. LC, ‘The New Individualism’, 17 December 1914, 20. Socialist, 13 September 1912, 1. See also the article on Wilde in Socialist, 4 October 1912, 4. Michael Freeden, Liberalism Divided (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 20–26, and Ross McKibbin, Parties and People: England 1914–1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 22.

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Chapter Two

External Reinforcement The centrality of the liberal argument was reinforced by external develop­ ments. Among the most important was the increasingly authoritarian political environment in which the labour movement found itself.43 Increasing state repression, much of it under the capacious umbrella of the War Precautions Act, and other unchecked infringements on basic civil rights took a number of forms. Censorship of the labour press began to pose problems as soon as the war had broken out. But under Hughes and Acting Prime Minister Pearce its reach became markedly more extensive, intrusive and partisan. Military raids on the THC and the Labor Call in late July 1916 to seize the manifesto issued by the AATUCC marked a further escalation. And there had already been repeated efforts by small groups of soldiers to break up anti-conscription meetings, while the police looked on, only to arrest those whose meeting was being attacked. Events like these produced passionate public advocacy of traditional free­ doms – freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly. Numerous labour activists agreed on the foundational importance of free speech to both democracy in general and the labour movement in particular.44 As if in despair, the Labor Call felt it necessary to reprint large extracts from John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty.45 The THC condemned the military raids on its premises and newspaper and expressed alarm at the casual accusations of disloyalty and treason that Pearce leveled at a delegation which went to see him about the raids. A leading socialist union leader was ‘more disgusted’ by these raids, ‘than by anything else since Labor had been in power’.46 And the repeated efforts of uniformed soldiers to break up public meetings seemed to 43

44

45 46

See Alan D. Gilbert and Ann-Mari Jordens, ‘Traditions of Dissent’, in Two Centuries of War and Peace, eds M. McKernan and M. Browne (Canberra: Australian War Memorial,1988), 353, Meaney, Australia and the World Crisis 1914–1923, 35, 167, Frank Cain, The Origins of Political Surveillance in Australia (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1983), and the letter of 25 December 1916 from Fisher’s old friend W.H. Demaine, editor of the Maryborough Alert, in Fisher papers, NLA MS 2919/1/286. For more on Demaine, see Fitzhardinge, The Little Digger, 1914–1952, 234. See, for example: Boote, ‘Concerning Freedom’ AW, 17 February 1916, 17 and ‘A Word For Freedom’ AW, 6 April 1916, 1; Ross, AW, 16 March 1916, 20; Anstey and others, LC, 11 May 1916, 2, 20. All insisted on the ‘fundamental’ importance of free speech. See also the ‘Manifesto of the United Peace and Free Speech Committee’ in Riley papers, NLA MS 759, Box, 51, Folder 6/4. ‘On Liberty’, LC, 8 June 1916, 2 and LC, 15 June 1916, 2. See Delegate Hyett in LC, 10 August 1916, 4. For the raids and the response to them, see LC, 10 August 1916, 4 & 10, LC, 17 August 1916, 4, AW, 3 August 1916, 16, AW, 10 August 1916, 15 and Cain, The Origins of Political Surveillance in Australia, 111–13.

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T he Conscription Conflict and the Great War

offer another ‘sample’ of the kind of threat about which anti-conscriptionists had been warning.47 This public outrage was not a tactical artifice. Episodes like these had an immediate visceral effect on the leaders and intellectuals at the heart of the anti-conscription movement. The threat to civil liberties they spoke of was not some abstract theoretical threat but part of their lived experience. Already in January 1916, a private letter denouncing the censors – ‘these satraps of militarism’ – gives some feeling for how Boote experienced this threat. ‘Freedom is dead’, he wrote. ‘Sometime when I write I seem to feel shackles on my wrists.’48 And the private letters of his partner, Mary Ellen Lloyd, to her brother show just how frequently Boote was forced into conflicts with the censors and how personally and emotionally exercised by them he was.49 Similar experiences affected Holloway, who was awoken at home late at night by military police, F.J. Riley (of the Australia Peace Alliance), who found himself arrested and brought before a magistrate for his efforts to stand between a group of marauding and abusive soldiers and Vida Goldstein and other women speakers, and R.S. Ross (of the Victorian Socialist Party), whose movements and correspondence were constantly being tracked by military intelligence, the censor and the police.50 Episodes like these also helped to spread the anti-conscriptionist message and strengthen its plausibility. They seemed to foreshadow what to expect if conscription were introduced and a more fully fledged militarism allowed to develop. In the wake of repeated threats to free speech, some established figures like Justice Higgins lent credence to the argument that basic freedoms were in jeopardy.51 The raids and ban on the AATUCC anti-conscription manifesto were also ‘manna from Heaven’ according to Holloway, as ‘in­ difference in many was suddenly turned to curiosity and interest’.52 And Boote thought that soldiers’ attacks on a large public meeting in the Sydney 47

For a cartoon illustrating this, see ‘A Sample’, AW, 13 July 1916, cover. On attacks by soldiers and labour’s response see AW, 13 April 1916, 20, AW, 13 July 1916, 15, AW, 27 July 1916, 1 & 15. 48 See Boote’s letter to Ross on 28 January 1916 in Ross papers, NLA MS 3222/1/20. 49 Lloyd, Sidelights on Two Referendums 1916–1917, 28–29, 38, 43, 44, 45, 50, 51, 53, 56, 58, 59. 50 On Holloway, see his report to the THC in LC, 10 August 1916, 4. On Riley see AW, 6 April 1916, 20 and Riley papers NLA MS 759, Box 51, Folder 6/1, 15 May 1916. On Ross see Cain, The Origins of Political Surveillance in Australia, 15–16, 102, 129–30. 51 AW, 27 April 1916, 4, LC, 27 April 1916, 4 & 6, and Queensland Worker cartoon in LC, 18 May 1916, 1. 52 Holloway, The Australian Victory over Conscription in 1916–1918, 7.

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Domain ‘had an educational effect of the greatest importance, and helped confirm public opinion in its opposition to the militarising of our social life’.53 In short, these events served to demonstrate the reality of the threats to freedom about which anti-conscriptionists warned. We know that demands for free speech and civil liberties were common in similar situations, especially in historically liberal societies. Indeed, the American Civil Liberties Union had its origins in the campaign against the gaoling of the great American labour leader and socialist, Eugene Debs, for supposedly interfering with the draft during the First World War in a careful public speech in Canton, Ohio.54 In such environments, it would be surprising if liberal arguments were not to the fore. The centrality of the anti-conscriptionists’ liberal argument was also re­ inforced by shifts in the ideological environment. Of special importance was the increasingly militaristic rhetoric of the Prime Minister. It was not simply that he seemed poised to advocate a policy of conscription. It was also the terms in which he seemed to advocate it that alarmed so many activists. Hughes’ ‘Billy Pulpit’ now gave him a powerful agenda-setting role, and many labour, socialist and pacifist activists found themselves increasingly alienated by his normative framework and the contempt he felt for those who hoped to eventually foster peace and international comity, if not now then at least after the war. Speaking at the Mansion House in London on 18 April 1916, Hughes called not just for the vigorous prosecution of the war, but also for the recognition of its virtues. ‘War prevents us from slipping into the abyss of degeneracy’, he argued. ‘War, like the glorious beams of the sun, has dried up mists of suspicion with which class regarded class … War has purged us. War has saved us from physical and moral degeneracy and decay.’55 Ramsey MacDonald thought that Hughes’ speeches ‘rival the most intolerant utter­ ances of the British Jingos’. Indeed, some sounded more like the textbook militarism of its paradigm Prussian proponents.56 Though he had once embraced elements of the radical liberal view of war, more militaristic values had been present in Hughes interventions for 53 54 55 56

AW, 17 August 1916, 1. Ernest Freeberg, Democracy’s Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008). LC, 11 May 1916, 1. Compare with Boote’s crie de coeur at the start of the war: ‘It is false to say that war strengthens and uplifts a nation. That is one of those monstrous fallacies invented to excuse men in the evil they do.’ See AW, 6 August 1914, 15. For MacDonald see LC, 20 April 1916, 1. For the Prussian comparison see LC, 11 May 1916, 1.

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T he Conscription Conflict and the Great War

some years.57 Hughes had often attacked peace activists and international social­ists and his speeches were full of scorn for the ‘simple people who had browsed the pastures of pacifism’ and ‘babble about peace and the brotherhood of man’.58 But he had not previously donned so fully the garb of militarism. Internationalism was now described as ‘a pallid, feeble, sickly and spineless thing’, while ‘the race, as a result of the war, had “found its soul” …’59 Hughes sometimes appealed to the authority of the slain French socialist leader, Jean Jaures, to support his stance on conscription. But the gulf in the moral framework within which their respective proposals were embedded could hardly have been starker. For Jaures was a passionate advocate for the very peace activists and international socialists whom Hughes scorned. Something of this gap can also be seen between Hughes and Fisher. Indeed Fisher had spent a day with Jaures in Paris in 1911 and admired his ‘burning desire for peace’.60 The gap with Hughes came out clearly in a debate about international arbitration at the Australian Labor Party’s 1915 Common­ wealth conference. While Hughes argued that this would be futile without an international policeman and penalties, Fisher argued against ‘too limited a vision … He believed that the great war would leave behind it a lesson to mankind which would raise them to a higher plane … just as the poets had dreamed of …’61 Hughes arguments varied with his audience. Sometimes, as here, he sought to present his military policies as simply a product of realism. But the militarist values that came to inform these policies also had an idealist dimension. They were not just a purportedly realistic assessment of how to confront endemic human conflict and war, but an idealistic assessment of the role that war could play in preventing degeneration and promoting higher goals. Hughes’ overtly illiberal militarism and his valorisation of aggression highlighted both the gulf between him and his anti-conscriptionist op­ ponents and the common broadly liberal assumptions these opponents shared.

57 Meaney, Australia and the World Crisis 1914–1923, 15–19. 58 W. Farmer Whyte, William Morris Hughes (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1957), 193; Daily Telegraph, 7 October 1911. 59 Meaney, Australia and the World Crisis 1914–1923, 135–7. 60 LC, 6 August 1914, 1 and Meaney, Australia and the World Crisis 1914–1923, 10. 61 See Australian Labor Party, Official Report of the Sixth Commonwealth Conference … May 31st 1915 (Sydney: Worker Trade Union Printery, 1915), 22–25.

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The Loyalism Dilemma Just as ‘liberty’ was the great rallying cry of the anti-conscriptionists, ‘loyalty’ was the great cry of their opponents. Anti-conscriptionists thus faced a dilemma: how could they pursue their liberty-based argument while min­ imising the dangers of being painted as disloyal? There were two ways of framing their argument that helped them do this. The first emphasised the Britishness of the liberal tradition in general and the rejection of military compulsion in particular. The introduction of conscription in Britain in January 1916 complicated this approach. Hence­ forth, anti-conscriptionists could not simply invoke British tradition; they had to invoke it against British practice. As a result, the conscription conflict became, in part, a conflict between different kinds of British loyalty: loyalty to what Britain was doing versus loyalty to British ideas.62 A related response was to shift the focus from the British tradition itself to what all agreed was its antithesis – ‘continental despotism’. Since conscription was widely seen as a defining characteristic of continental despotism, this put the advocates of conscription on the back foot. For it forced them to confront the perverse logic of appearing to argue that we must stop ourselves from being Prussianised by Prussianising ourselves. Anti-conscriptionists made great use of this critique,63 and it was increasingly attached to the person of Hughes. Now, of course, the great continental depot was the Kaiser. But the paradigm was still Napoleon. Hughes was ‘Australia’s political Napoleon’, the ‘new Napoleon’ or ‘the Napoleonic Hughes’.64 A striking, oft-reproduced 62

63

64

This reasoning was apparent in anti-conscription resolutions from the outset. See, for example, the AWU resolution in AW, 3 February 1916, 19. See also delegate Pidgeon in AW, 13 January 1916, 5, delegate Read in Leslie C. Jauncey, The Story of Conscription in Australia (London: George, Allen and Unwin, 1935), 120–26, the Manifesto of the National Executive in Australian Trade Union Congress, Proceedings, 4, AW, 28 September 1916, 3, and LC, 12 October 1916, 11. For early reactions to the introduction of conscription in Britain, see AW, 6 January 1916, 1 and AW, 3 February 1916, 19. For earlier examples, see the 1915 NCF pamphlet, ‘Do you want German rule?’ in Riley papers, NLA, MS 759, box 52, folder, 7, and the ILP statement reprinted in LC, 29 July 1915, inside back cover. For its regular use thereafter, see AW, 24 August 1916, 15; LC, 26 October 1916, 2; LC, 25 May 1916, 4; and LC, 28 September 1916, 2. See also Maurice Blackburn’s argument, citing G.K.Chesterton, that ‘Conscription is not a way of conquering the Germans, but a way of conquering the English’; AW, 1 June 1916, 19. This ‘Prussian’ argument was also represented in a number of cartoons – see, for example, LC, 4 May 1916, 1 and LC, 24 August 1916, 1 – culminating in the well-known cartoon ‘Prussianism Defeated’ in LC, 16 November 1916, 1 (see Image 16). LC, 17 August 1916, 4,10; LC, 16 October 1916, 4. See also the background image in the cartoon in AW, 5 October 1916, 17.

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cartoon by Claude Marquet captures the essence of this critique. (See Image 17). Commenting on the result, the Labor Call declared simply that ‘The Australian Napoleon has met his Waterloo’.65 The second way of framing their argument to which anti-conscriptionists appealed emphasised the special affinity between the liberal tradition and the New World. On this account the introduction of conscription threatened a return to the social hierarchy and political autocracy of the Old World. Prior to the First World War, the standard point of reference for these arguments was the United States.66 But with the United States remaining neutral and President Wilson campaigning for re-election on a ‘he kept us out of the war’ platform, appealing to American experience threatened to damage the anticonscription cause by confusing it with an anti-war stance. Instead, it was Canada that now loomed large. Both Conservative Prime Minister Borden and Liberal Leader of the Opposition Laurier declared that they had no intention of introducing conscription, and this ‘Canadian common­sense’ was invoked over and over again. 67 If ‘loyal Canada … declines to put on the shackles of militarism’ why should Australia.68 This, thought one anti-conscriptionist, was their ‘best argument’.69 Both the ‘Continental despotism’ and ‘Canadian commonsense’ argu­ ments served to minimise the target that anti-conscriptionists presented to their loyalist opponents, though they did so in different ways. While the Canadian argument dealt with the loyalism dilemma by focusing on the best model of what to emulate, the Continental despotism argument dealt with it by focusing on the paradigm model of what to avoid.

Potential Criticisms In the rest of this chapter, I want to try to pre-empt a number of potential criticisms of my position. I will consider three, in order of increasing radical­ ism. The first arises from a now standard interpretation of the conscription 65 66 67

68 69

AW, 19 October 1916, 1; LC, 2 November 1916, 3, 4; Socialist, 17 November 1916, 1. Robin Archer, Why Is There No Labor Party in the United States? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 17, 163, 209–14. AW, 14 September 1916, 5. In fact Canada did introduce a conscription Bill in May 1917. But there was no indication of this prior to the 1916 referendum, and Borden’s ‘conversion’ came as a surprise within Canada. Laurier remained opposed; see J.L. Granatstein and J.M. Hitsman, Broken Promises: A History of Conscription in Canada (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1977). See T.J. Miller, ‘Conscription – Its Effects on Industry and Business’ in Riley papers MS 759 NLA, folder 6/3. LC, 14 September 1916, 3.

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conflict.70 According to this criticism, the conflict was not really about conscription. The second arises from the most influential revisionist inter­ pretation.71 According to this criticism, labour anti-conscriptionists were not really motivated by liberal concerns. And the third has been highlighted by the most recent work to systematically examine the conflict.72 According to this criticism, the labour movement was not really opposed in principle to conscription at all.

A Factional Conflict The first criticism is in fact common to both the standard interpretation of Ian Turner and the revisionist interpretation of John Hirst. Both argue that what really underlay the conscription conflict was a factional struggle between labour’s industrial and political wings – between ‘industrialists’ and politicians – a struggle that sharpened markedly in the wake of Hughes’ decision to abandon Labor’s commitment to hold a referendum on price con­ trols. Thus, ‘anti-conscription became one (finally the most important) of the watchwords with which trade unionists challenged politicians for control of the movement. The primary motives were economic …’73 The conflict over conscription was really about an internal power struggle whose ‘underlying significance … was the reassertion of class interests’.74 And ‘conscription was as much the occasion of the Labor split as the cause of it’.75 Ultimately, of course, it is the decisions of politicians – the people who are said to have been fighting the industrialists for control – that we have to explain. How are we to explain their opposition to conscription? According to this first criticism they were basically acting under pressure from unions and from union-influenced party organisations. In particular, they were acting under pressure of the threat of deselection. There is evidence that some MPs were acting under pressure of deselection. Both leading opponents of conscription, like THC Secretary Holloway,76 and leading supporters, like Defence Minister Pearce, refer to it, though even 70 Turner, Industrial and Labour Politics. 71 J.B. Hirst, ‘Australian Defence and Conscription: A Re-assessment, Part I’, Australian Historical Studies, 25, no 101 (1993): 608–27. 72 Nick Dyrenfurth, Heroes and Villains: The Rise and Fall of the Early Labor Party (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2011). 73 Turner, Industrial and Labour Politics, 113. 74 Ibid., 178. 75 Hirst, ‘Australian Defence and Conscription: A Re-assessment’, 617. 76 Holloway, The Australian Victory over Conscription in 1916–1918, 16–17.

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Pearce only claimed that ‘a dozen men’ (out of a caucus of 71) had been influenced in this way.77 And a struggle between so-called ‘industrialists’ and ‘politicians’ (especially the supporters of State Premier Holman) certainly did take place within the New South Wales Labor Party.78 But MPs were subject to multiple pressures, which pulled in quite dif­ ferent directions. There were also incentives emanating from the executive patronage power of the Prime Minister that led some MPs to desist from opposing conscription.79 In addition, MPs were subject to electoral incentives resulting from their perceptions about how voters would react. All sides agreed that a ‘Yes’ vote was likely to prevail in a referendum. And so for many MPs this created further incentives to favour conscription or at least to desist from opposing it.80 The silence of the Minister for Home Affairs, King O’Malley, provides a good example of both these additional incentives at work. Despite a long history of voluble opposition to military compulsion, O’Malley stayed stumm for most of the conflict and only resigned from Cabinet after the result. He did not want to end his cabinet prospects by ending his recent rapprochement with Hughes. And he feared that proconscription sentiment in Tasmania would threaten his electoral prospects.81 In any case, MPs were not simply responding to incentives. Their own beliefs also played an important role in determining their position. We can see this by comparing their attitudes in 1916 with what we know about their prior attitudes to military compulsion. It is not easy to systematically gather evidence of prior attitudes for all MPs, or even just for Senators. But we can illustrate the connection to earlier attitudes by looking at opponents in Cabinet – a group who tended to leave a richer written record. Six of the ten members of Cabinet eventually expressed public opposition to Hughes’ stance. All six had a history of opposition to, or scepticism about, military compulsion. 77 78

See his letter of 21 November 1916 in Fisher papers, NLA, MS 2919/1/265–8. See ‘Industrialist versus Politician’, AW, 27 April 1916, 15. Though note that in NSW, federal MPs split between pro- and anti- conscription positions (7 to 11) more evenly than in any other State. 79 Holloway, The Australian Victory over Conscription in 1916–1918, 17. 80 See the comments of P.J. Moloney MHR at the Victorian PLC in LC, 4 May 1916, 9, and Senator Ready during the debate on the referendum bill in Marilyn Lake, A Divided Society: Tasmania During World War I (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1975), 70. But see also Higgs letter to Fisher on 11 May 1916 in the Fisher papers, NLA, MS 2919/1/203 about how some Labor MPs might be defeated by voters if they advocated conscription. 81 A.R. Hoyle, King O’Malley: ‘The American Bounder’ (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1981).

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Trade Minister Tudor had spoken against compulsory military training at Labor’s 1908 federal conference and had moved a resolution against accept­ ing the principle of compulsion in the Party’s federal Caucus in October 1909 which lost by one vote.82 He was a Congregationalist – a member of a dissenting church that was disproportionably involved in opposition to conscription. Tudor was the first to resign, in protest against the decision to hold a referendum, and he led Labor after the split. Treasurer Higgs had opposed the 1910 Defence Bill’s extension of CMT, had brought up the case of conscientious objectors in parliament in 1914 before the war broke out, and had criticised the War Census bill in Caucus in 1915 because of its potential to facilitate conscription.83 Vice-President of the Executive Council and Assistant Minister for Defence Gardiner had opposed CMT in 1910, supported an amendment in 1911 to preclude the possibility of those on compulsory military service being used as strike breakers, and had expressed concern about the unjust treatment of socialist conscientious objectors in 1912.84 Assistant Minister Russell had been a member of the VSP until 1907 and he maintained some ties with activists from that period even as his attitudes became more equivocal. 85 Higgs, Gardiner and Russell resigned on the eve of the referendum over Hughes attempt to manipulate the balloting. External Affairs Minister Mahon had emphasised his opposition to compulsory military service in his first federal election campaign in 1901, and continued to argue that military expenditure should be contained by ensuring it was funded by direct tax increases and not debt in 1908 and subsequently. He was an Irish-born Catholic, an Irish nationalist and a former secretary of Charles Parnell – the preeminent Irish nationalist leader at Westminster in the late nineteenth century. 86 Home Affairs Minister O’Malley had objected strenuously to CMT and militarism at the 1908 82

Australian Labor Party, Official Report of the Fourth Commonwealth Political Labour Conference … July 6, 1908 (Brisbane: The Worker Office, 1908), 19; Weller, Caucus Minutes 1901–1949, 244. 83 Thomas W. Tanner, Compulsory Citizen Soldiers (Sydney: Alternative Publishing Cooperative, 1980), 175; Jauncey, The Story of Conscription in Australia, 58–60, 82; Weller, Caucus Minutes 1901–1949, 413n50. 84 Tanner, Compulsory Citizen Soldiers, 204. Note that the 1911 amendment had been sponsored by then Senator Rae, who also had an earlier history of opposition to CMT as well as to its effects on conscientious objects. On the latter, see LC, 16 July 1914. 85 See Ross papers NLA MS 3222 1/4. 86 Mahon papers NLA 937/13/812–4 and Australian Labor Party, Official Report of the Fourth Commonwealth Political Labour Conference … July 6, 1908.

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federal Labor conference, maintained his objections in parliament in 1909, and refused to provide census data to help prosecute those flouting the CMT laws.87 Mahon and O’Malley only resigned after the referendum. In the absence of more direct evidence, we can also infer something about MPs’ likely proclivities from known drivers of ideological preferences. British birth and schooling, for example, might be thought to increase the attraction of loyalist demands. While an Irish Catholic background might be thought to increase scepticism about loyalist demands. Evidence of a correlation between country of birth or religion and a politician’s stance on conscription would sit uneasily with the claim that the conscription conflict was really a factional struggle between industrialists and politicians. But such a correlation can be observed both among MPs as a whole and in the crucial Senate.88 While eight of the nine Catholic Senators opposed conscription, a more even 13 of the 22 Protestant Senators did. And while 13 of the 16 Australian-born Senators opposed conscription, a more even seven of the 12 British-born Senators did.89 So the critique that the conscription conflict was really a factional conflict between the industrial and political wings of the labour movement suffers from a number of problems. Many politicians had pre-existing beliefs and commitments that influenced their stance, and the critique does not allow for the influence of these beliefs. And even if politicians were simply re­ sponding to incentives, the structure of these incentives was more complex than the critique suggests. It did include those generated by party and union 87 88

89

Ibid., 17; Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 52, 4691, 19 October 1909; and Jauncey, The Story of Conscription in Australia, 53. My Senate data draws on a reassessment of contemporary and subsequent tabulations as well as individual biographical information, some from private papers. The most important published source are: L.F. Crisp and S.P. Bennett, Labour Members of the Commonwealth Parliament 1901–1954 (Canberra: Canberra University College, 1954); Joan Rydon, A Biographical Register of the Commonwealth Parliament 1901–1972 (Canberra: ANU Press, 1975); L.F. Crisp and Barbara Atkinson, Australian Labour Party Federal Parliamentarians 1901–1981 (Canberra: Australian National University, 1981); Ann Millar, ed., The Biographical Dictionary of the Australian Senate, Volume 1 1901–1929 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2000); Australian Dictionary of Biography; and AW, 2 November 1916. For one estimate of MPs as a whole, see Humphrey McQueen, ‘Who were the Conscriptionists?’ in Gallipoli to Petrov: Arguing with Australian History (Sydney: George Allen and Unwin, 1984). Note that with one or possibly two exceptions, the British-born arrived in Australia having finished primary school and when they were already of working age. The British figures do not include the three Senators born in Ireland, two of whom (a Protestant and a Catholic) were for conscription and one of whom (a Catholic) was against.

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organisations, like the fear of deselection. But it also included incentives generated by the Prime Minister and the possibility of executive office as well as those generated by the electorate itself – incentives that often pulled MPs in the opposite direction.

An Inauthentic Liberalism A second criticism suggests that opposition to conscription in the labour movement was not really motivated by liberal values at all – indeed, that the invocation of liberal values was largely inauthentic. Hirst argues that, as the referendum campaign got under way, the ascendant industrialists ‘softpedalled’ the language of class with which they had originally framed their opposition to conscription and replaced it, for tactical reasons, with the more popular and palatable language of liberty.90 We have already seen that there were well established New Liberal arguments for linking the language of liberty and concerns about class. However, at its heart, this assessment of the motivations of labour anticonscriptionists turns on the claim that they adopted liberal arguments late in the conflict to address the public in general with a view to maximising their chances of influencing voters in the referendum. The trouble is that the organised labour movement’s opposition to con­ scrip­t ion was formalised in the first half of 1916. And the delegates who did this are quite clear that their resolutions are addressed, not to the public, but to federal Labor MPs and Ministers. Leading delegates at the meetings that settled the position of the Labor Party organisations in the two most important states were quite explicit that they intended to ‘send a pronouncement to Labor members’, to ‘impress [their] view on … the Federal Parliamentary party’, or to ‘help the Federal legislators to make up their minds’.91 The return of Hughes did not change this. On the contrary, during the month of uncertainty following his return, the focus on influencing Labor MPs and Ministers was redoubled. Suspicion of Hughes himself was longstanding amongst labour anti-conscriptionists. And the speeches the Prime Minister made in London and the company he kept there had

90 91

Hirst, Australian Defence and Conscription: A Re-assessment’, 617–18. See delegates McNeill, Kean, and Mutch, AW, 4 May 1916, 20 and 11 May 1916, 19. See also LC, 4 May 1916, 9. Large public meetings had a similar focus; see AW, 22 June 1916, 15. This had been the focus from the outset; see, for example, Nobes’ letter, AW, 3 February 1916, 15.

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only strengthened this suspicion.92 However, his apparent prevarication throughout August encouraged anti-conscriptionists to join in the ‘courting of William’.93 As the most influential labour paper commented following Hughes announcement of a referendum, ‘Right up to the last, “The Worker” hoped that William Hughes was going to be true to the pledge he gave Australia only a few months ago … [not] to send men out of this country to fight against their will.’94 The basic stance of the labour anti-conscriptionists is particularly well captured by another of Claude Marquet’s cartoons: ‘Hughlysses and the Sirens’ (see Image 14). As the cartoon suggests, their efforts were directed at tying Hughes and by extension the government to the solid mast of the labour movement – indeed in the story Ulysses has himself tied to the mast – to avoid being dashed on the rocks: tempted by the siren song of the employers, the Universal Service League, the Liberal Party and its leaders, and ‘granny’ of the daily press with their mellifluous calls for conscription. Here is the profound suspicion, indeed fear, of the destructive and self-destructive potential of the Prime Minister; but also the hope, that by binding him (and his government) firmly to the mast of the labour movement, both the movement and his own better self may yet be saved. Moreover, even after Hughes announced that there would be a refer­ endum, their basic stance did not alter. Any attempt to influence Hughes himself was now abandoned. But anti-conscriptionists continued to focus their attention first on the cabinet and caucus and then on individual MPs. Their basic objective was to get Labor MPs to block Hughes’ referendum proposal and, should that fail, to reject it in parliament. They argued that holding a referendum to settle this matter was indefensible. Even if a majority supported conscription – and the anti-conscription activists antici­pated that they would – it would still be an intolerable infringement of individual conscience. The Australian Peace Alliance, working closely with the labour movement and the VSP, commissioned an opinion from a barrister setting out why a referendum conducted under the War Pre­ cautions Act would not deliver a fair expression of the people’s will. They

92 See AW, 16 April 1916, 1; AW, 30 March 1916, 1, 10; AW, 1 June 1916, 15. The LC was less reluctant and more full-throated in its criticisms; see for example, LC, 20 April 1916, 1 and cf. AW, 27 January 1916, 1 regarding that paper’s ‘reluctant discontent’. 93 AW, 19 August 1916, 1. 94 AW, 7 September 1916, 1.

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had it circulated to all MPs in the third week of September with advice as to how they could stop it.95 Only when the Bill to hold a referendum passed in late September did the anti-conscriptionists’ principle focus shift to the voting public. Once the Bill was passed and the referendum campaign was underway, anticonscriptionists did indeed frame their arguments with voters as their principle target audience. And during five weeks of intensive campaigning they threw every argument they could think of into the debate. But the liberal arguments which had helped to settle the labour move­ ment’s position in the key eastern states had been advanced before there was any suggestion of a referendum. At this point anti-conscriptionists were not anticipating a referendum, so they could hardly have been making their arguments with a view to influencing such a vote. Rather they were focused on winning over fellow activists and ensuring that Labor MPs and Ministers would keep Australia free of conscription. Moreover, when a referendum was mooted, their top priority was to have it stopped. Their principle target audience continued to be Labor MPs and ministers, whom they hoped to be able to convince to block any such ballot. Only in the month before the referendum were they forced to address themselves principally to the voters. Only then did the public become their main audience.

The Conscription of Wealth A third criticism suggests the still more radical argument that labour was not in principle opposed to conscription at all. According to Dyrenfurth, labour’s basic instinct was to support a policy of ‘dual [or true] conscription’ in which the conscription of life would be accompanied by the conscription of wealth.96 According to this argument, it was only when it became ap­ parent that the government was not serious about the conscription of wealth that the labour movement came to object to its conscription proposals. 95

On ‘An indefensible referendum’ see AW, 14 September 1916, 1. On the anticipated result see LC, 7 September 1916, 4. And on Barrister Foster’s opinion, see Riley papers NLA MS 759, Box 51 Folder 6/3 and LC, 21 September 1916, 6, 8. See also ‘Why we should turn the referendum down’, LC, 14 September 1916, 4, and the rejection of a referendum in the Brisbane Trades Union Congress ‘No Conscription’ Manifesto of 26–27 August 1916 in Ross papers, NLA MS 3222, Folder 5. 96 Dyrenfurth, Heroes and Villains, 200–7. Dyrenfurth broadly accepts the arguments of Turner and Hirst but moves beyond them to adopt this stronger position. On the central role of Turner-like organisational tensions see ibid., 176, 185–6, 190. On his Hirst-like scepticism about the role of labour’s freedom-based anti-conscription arguments see ibid., 198, 199, 201, 206–7, 209.

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This inconsistent treatment of wealth was, says Dyrenfurth, ‘the crucial determining factor’ in the development of labour’s attitude.97 Labour was not opposed to the principle of conscription, but only to its inequitable application. Had a comprehensive policy of ‘true/real conscription’ been pursued, he suggests, labour may well have favoured it. There were certainly some labour leaders and activists who genuinely favoured ‘dual conscription’, just as there were some who favoured the con­ scription of men, irrespective.98 But in the key states of New South Wales and Victoria (which together had over two-third of all voters) and in the country as a whole, their position was explicitly rejected by large majorities of labour delegates. At the Victorian PLC in April 1916, the initial motion opposing conscription ‘unless all wealth is first conscribed’ was rejected in favour of an amendment calling for unconditional opposition, which was passed with ‘one dissentient’. At the New South Wales PLL the next month, former Senator Rae, whose motion was carried by ‘a large majority’, explicitly rejected the idea of putting ‘wealth and property on one end of the beam and human life on the other’. And at the AATUCC soon after, an amendment opening the way for conscription if wealth were conscripted first, was rejected by more than four votes to one.99 The conscription of wealth was not typically demanded as a quid pro quo for the introduction of conscription of men. Rather it was demanded as necessary to counterbalance the existing sacrifices of volunteers. Over and over again, a contrast was drawn between the worker-soldier who vol­ unteers his life and the wealthy capitalist who will not offer the use of his wealth without special terms and interest payments. This construction was present throughout, from the earliest anti-conscription resolutions.100 And it remained common once the referendum campaign had begun. As one AWU organiser said in an open letter to Hughes, ‘the people have made

97 98

Ibid., 200. Ibid., 200–7. See also: Maurice Blackburn, The Conscription Referendum of 1916 (Melbourne: Anti-Conscription Celebration League, 1936), 10; Demaine letter 25 December 1916, in Fisher papers, MS 2919, NLA. 99 On Victoria, see LC, 4 May 1916, 9–10. See also LC, 29 April 1916, 7. On New South Wales, see AW, 11 May 1916, 19. On AATUCC, see Australian Trade Union Congress, Proceedings, 12–13. 100 See, for example, the stance of the Worker and the Brisbane Industrial Council in AW, 13 January 1916, 3, 5 as well as AW, 9 December 1915, cartoon, ‘The One Shall Give – The Other Lend’; AW, 20 April 1916, 11; AW, 11 May 1916, 11; AW 17 August 1916, 11; AW, 14 September 1916, 11.

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their sacrifice, let wealth now do the same’.101 It is revealing that the call for conscription of wealth was also made by organisations, like the No Conscription Fellowship, whose whole purpose was to oppose conscription of men.102 However, ‘conscription of wealth’ was not just part of a moral argument about equity of sacrifice; it was also proposed as a practical measure to ensure the continued effectiveness of the voluntary system of recruitment. It would help to strengthen the voluntary system because it would provide resources that could fund the kind of pay for soldiers and support for the families of the wounded and fallen that would enable more men to come forward. This argument was embodied in formal resolutions at both the Victorian PLC and the AATUCC, and in Holloway’s later circular on behalf of the AATUCC.103 In addition, the ‘conscription of wealth’ slogan was explicitly adopted for tactical reasons. The aim was to trap the conscriptionists with their own rhetoric – to highlight their hypocrisy and to draw out consequences of their demands that would force them to retreat. Far from being evidence of support for dual conscription, the purpose of raising this slogan was to help defeat conscription.104 In an early letter calling for a campaign around this demand, former Senator Rae argued explicitly that the ‘conscription of wealth’ slogan should be adopted ‘to turn the tables on the conscriptionists’.105 A cartoon in the Worker captures the essence of the strategy. Captioned ‘Getting a Chill’, the cartoon shows a capitalist tearing up his demand for the conscription of men when confronted with the need to conscript his wealth to pay for it.106 These concerns about whether the wealthy were contributing their fair share to the costs of the country’s defence predate the conscription debate and indeed the war. The calls for ‘conscription of wealth’ need to be under­ stood against this background. Getting the wealthy to pull their weight is a major theme in the labour press by the middle of 1915. However, it is 101 AW, 29 September 1916, 20. 102 See NCF 1915 flyer in Riley papers MS 759 NLA, Box 52, Folder 7. Similarly, see the March 1916 Manifesto of the United Peace and Free Speech Committee in Riley papers MS 759 NLA, Box 51, Folder 6/4. 103 See LC, 4 May 1916, 19, Australian Trade Union Congress, Proceedings, 12 & 14, and AW, 14 September 1916, 15. 104 See the related point that many pro-conscriptionists also saw the demand for conscription of wealth as a rhetorical device; Scott, The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, 336. 105 AW, 6 January 1916, 20. 106 AW, 3 August 1916, front cover. See also AW, 13 July 1916, 5.

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not initially couched in term of conscription, but in terms of the iniquity of paying substantial interest to secure loans from them, the need to tax their wealth and the importance of pursuing Labor’s proposed referendum on price controls.107 These concerns are themselves a continuation of longer standing concerns about the funding of military and defence policies – concerns which were in turn rooted in still older commitments running back through Gladstonian liberalism to the characteristic 19th century liberal commitment to ‘retrenchment’ following the vast expansion of public debt during the Napoleonic wars. It is striking to see the extent to which these carried over into the commitments of the pre-war Australian Labor Party. The demand that defence costs should be borne by the wealthy through direct taxation and not by borrowing was a regular theme in pre-war Labor manifestos and speeches – including the manifestos and speeches of those who would later be leading figures during the Fisher and first Hughes governments.108 And it remained a major plank of Labor’s policy in the 1914 election during the weeks before the war broke out.109 In Britain, the conscription of riches became an important unifying rallying cry of the labour movement in mid-1916. But there it was adopted as a fall back position following the introduction of military conscription, in order to bridge the differences within the labour movement between those who continued to oppose conscription and those who now felt that was impossible.110 Prior to the introduction of conscription, the overwhelming

107 See ‘The Burden of War’, AW, 15 July 1915, 1; ‘Cowardice of Wealth’ and ‘Men and Money’, AW, 22 July 1915, 11, 13; ‘If the Rich were Patriotic’, AW, 29 July 1915, 1; ‘The Patriotism of Shylock’ and ‘Force the Rich to Pay’, AW, 5 August 1915, 1, 12; ‘Shylock Threatens to Strike’, AW, 12 August 1915, 1; and ‘Referendum Proposals’, 19 August 1915, 1. 108 See, for example, Mahon’s speech on 8 November 1908 in Mahon papers, MS 937/67 NLA, Higgs letter of support on 2 May 1910 in Mahon papers, MS 937/154, and Catts 1910 election manifesto in Catts papers, MS 658 NLA, folder 1/9. Mahon was Minister for External Affairs from 1914–16, Higgs was Treasurer from 1915–16, and Catts was Labor’s campaign director in 1914 and the anti-conscription campaign director in 1916. 109 See Fisher’s policy speech in AW, 9 July 1914, 17. In the second phase of the election, after the war had begun, leading VSP activists, like Curtin, were among those who continued to emphasise that it would be intolerable to fund defence expenditure by borrowing. See LC, 20 August 1914, inside cover. 110 J.M. Winter, Socialism and the Challenge of War (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), 212; John N. Horne, Labour at War: France and Britain, 1914–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 234–39; John Horne, ‘Labour and Labour Movements in World War I’ in The Great War and the Twentieth Century, ed. Jay Winter et al (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 206.

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majority of TUC and the Labour Party leaders were firmly opposed to conscription, just like their Australian counterparts.111 Doubtless there were some in Australia who, assuming that conscription would be unavoidable, sought refuge in the ‘conscription of wealth’ as a kind of pre-emptive fall back position. But that was neither the original purpose of raising the slogan nor the prevailing position as the debate unfolded. No doubt the demand for ‘conscription of wealth’ had different meanings to different people in Australia. But for most labour activists it was seen as a demand for equity to counterbalance the sacrifices already incurred by volunteers, as a proposal for strengthening the voluntary system, and as a tactic to put the insurgent conscriptionists on the back foot.

Conclusion According to Hirst ‘the defence of individual liberty was a new position for the Labor Party to adopt’.112 But Labor’s thinking had in fact been deeply imprecated with liberal values since its foundation in the early 1890s.113 And the continuing efforts to draw a distinction between genuine liberalism and the inauthentic liberalism of their opponents is testimony to the enduring influence of labour’s liberalism.114 Liberal arguments were not the only reasons why the labour movement opposed conscription, but they were persistent and central reasons from the outset. These arguments were often linked to fears about industrial as well as military conscription. And they were lent credence, and their cen­tral­ity was reinforced, by an increasingly authoritarian environment and the increasingly militaristic rhetoric of Prime Minister Hughes and his supporters. In addition, to parry charges of disloyalty, labour anti-conscriptionists empha­ sised the Britishness of the liberal tradition and its affinity with New World exemplars. The powerful resonance of these arguments throughout the labour move­ ment, together with Australian labour’s precocious political strength, helped 111 Winter, Socialism and the Challenge of War, 211–12; Horne, Labour at War, 51–53; F.L. Carsten, War Against War, (London: Batsford, 1982), 57–59, 64–73. 112 Hirst, ‘Australian Defence and Conscription: A Re-assessment’, 618. 113 Archer, Why Is There No Labor Party in the United States? 114 For examples, both in public and in private, see LC, 28 May 1914, 1; LC, 4 June 1914, 7; AW, ‘Dead Men’s Shoes’, 9 July 1914, 19; and Fisher’s letter to his wife in Fisher papers, NLA, MS 2919, 1/103, 28 August 1914. See also Humphrey McQueen, ‘Victoria’ in Labor in Politics: The State Labor Parties in Australia 1880–1920, ed. D.J. Murphy (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1975), 311.

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block the Prime Minister’s efforts to introduce conscription by legislation or regulation and forced him to try to circumvent an unwilling parliament by holding a referendum.

Acknowledgements My thanks to all the participants in the Academy workshop out of which this book grew and especially to Marian Sawer and Sean Scalmer for their detailed and insightful written comments and to Frank Bongiorno for our ongoing conversations. Thanks also to the London School of Economics for research leave; to the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University for a very fruitful Visiting Fellowship; and to the staff at the National Library of Australia, the Noel Butlin Archives, the State Library of New South Wales and a number of other libraries for their firstrate professional assistance. Finally, heartfelt thanks to my mother, Olga Archer, for keeping me up to date with the latest scholarship from the Southern hemisphere, and to Elisabeth and Benji for making time for me to write when I should be making time to play.

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Part 2 Campaigns and Results

Cha pte r T h ree

A N T I- C ONS CR I P T ION I S M I N AU S T R A L I A Individuals, Organisations and Arguments Frank Bongiorno

In a book written for young people, published presumably before January 1916 when Britain introduced conscription, C.E. Sutton Turner explained that there was one great difference in the armies of Great Britain and Germany. In the British Empire, of which Australia is a part, only those who volunteer become soldiers and go to war. But in Germany and Austria every man is compelled to be a soldier, and forced to go to war, whether he wants to or not.1

Rash judgment is especially dangerous in wartime, and this way of under­ standing British freedom must soon have been an embarrassment to its highly patriotic author. But many anti-conscriptionists, no less than their opponents, were guided by well developed understandings of British liberty; and even after Britain had adopted a system of conscription, they continued to identify voluntarism as one of its ingredients. We should take seriously Australian anti-conscriptionists’ professions of a love of freedom and their conviction that conscription would destroy its very foundations. As Fred Riley of the Australian Peace Alliance told an Adelaide meeting in October 1915, ‘to compel a man to serve outside his 1

C.E. Sutton Turner, Quick March: The Story of England’s Great War: A Book for Australian Boys and Girls, (Sydney: Turner & Sons, n.d. [c. 1915]), 8.

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country, instead of encouraging them to go of their own free will, was a method abhorrent to those who had breathed our atmosphere of freedom’.2 Such claims were not mere window-dressing for economic or industrial goals, but the very essence of the anti-conscriptionist cause. In this respect, I depart from the arguments of historians of both left and right who have treated Australian anti-conscription, at least in its labour movement context, as a manifestation of essentially economic motives or of union leaders’ quest for control of the labour movement.3 This chapter explores key individuals and organisations involved in the fight against conscription, and the arguments that they deployed against the proposal. In the end, in a secret ballot system, any conclusions about why people voted the way they did in the plebiscites on conscription held in October 1916 and December 1917 will necessarily be tentative.4 Leslie C. Jauncey, one of the earliest historians of conscription in Australia, remarked that ‘[e]xcept in working-class circles there was a tendency for opponents of compulsion to keep their peace’.5 But active anti-conscriptionists did talk incessantly about freedom; and, in a society where British culture provided so many of the resources of political discourse, it seems plausible that appeals to British liberty had a resonance among ‘silent’ voters wary of handing over to government greater power over the lives of its citizenry than the state already possessed. It is true that in the campaigns over conscription, as is commonly the case in political controversies, opponents grasped at pretty much any argu­ ment that they thought might sway voters. 6 Yet the idea of liberty – the vision of what a free antipodean society should look like – also made meaningful a diverse range of their claims about the likely deleterious effects of conscription. It was never the only appeal. There was also a class rhetoric, whose proponents presented conscription as a plot by capitalists to enslave 2 3

4

5 6

Woman Voter, 14 October 1915, 3. Ian Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics: The Dynamics of the Labour Movement in Eastern Australia, 1900–1921 (Canberra: The Australian National University Press, 1965), 113, an argument largely accepted by J.B. Hirst, ‘Australian Defence and Conscription: A Re-assessment, Part I’, Australian Historical Studies 25, no. 101 (October 1993): 617. But see the chapter in this book by Murray Goot, including his critique of the influential cliometric appraisal of Glenn Withers, ‘The 1916–1917 Conscription Referenda: A Cliometric Re-appraisal’, Historical Studies 20, no. 78 (April 1982): 36–47. Leslie C. Jauncey, The Story of Conscription in Australia (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1935), 202. Hirst, ‘Australian Defence and Conscription: A Re-assessment, Part I’, 616.

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the workers and prolong the war for material gain. There were arguments about freedom of conscience, some based explicitly on religious ideas, others – like that of Riley – more secular in their orientation; but the unifying idea was that no one should be forced to fight in spite of his own better judgment. Opponents of conscription referred to a supposed threat to White Australia, alleging the existence of a secret plan to replace conscripted workers with cheap coloured labour, or raising the spectre of a Japanese attack on a nation denuded of its white manhood. Some, like Archbishop Daniel Mannix during the 1917 campaign, argued that Australian defence needed to be the first priority, that of the British Empire second. And there were also more mundane arguments: that the voluntary system was already producing a sufficient number of recruits, that Australia had done enough, or that conscription would make no difference to the balance of forces. Nonetheless, for all this variety, the idea of freedom provided a measure of coherence to anti-conscriptionist rhetoric. Whether it was the liberty of the individual, class, nation or race that was seen as imperilled, the rhetoric of freedom and slavery was rarely far from the forefront of the anti-conscriptionist struggle.

Shaping a Movement Anti-conscriptionists came from a variety of organisations professing many ideological positions and attitudes to the war. There were small, militant groups who were active in the field from 1915, the vanguard in a struggle that would eventually, one way or another, involve much of the population. Such organisations, which often opposed the war outright, included the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), also known as the Wobblies, a Chicago-based radical organisation that had set up in Australia in 1907; and the Women’s Peace Army, an offshoot of the Women’s Political Association founded in 1915, with veteran women’s rights advocate Vida Goldstein as its president and Adela Pankhurst of the famous British suffragette family as secretary. Both groups won notoriety for their resolute opposition to the war. The IWW joined with other radicals to form an Anti-Conscription League in Sydney and an Anti-Conscription and Anti-Militarist League in Melbourne in July 1915.7 Wobblies subsequently cooperated with other small radical bodies in organising meetings against conscription, and their growing prominence in the cause exposed an ever larger number of people to the IWW’s anarcho-syndicalism, an ideology that envisaged the use of 7

Verity Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism: The Industrial Workers of the World in Australia, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 197–8.

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the general strike as an instrument of revolution. Whether the strike should be deployed as a weapon against conscription was controversial in the labour movement, but on this point the IWW was uncompromising. It was adamant also in preaching class war, and in challenging labour movement racism.8 Yet despite differences over ideology and strategy, there was significant cooperation between the IWW and the mainstream labour movement over conscription. In June 1916 a meeting in the Sydney Domain included rep­resentatives of the State Labor Party executive, the Trades and Labour Council, the Australian Workers Union, the Boilermakers Union and the Socialist Party, as well as the IWW.9 The humour that the IWW brought to the anti-conscription campaign – often delivered through its rich repertoire of political song – was a welcome contribution to a society undergoing the stresses of brutal warfare and domestic conflict. Meanwhile, the arrest during the 1916 campaign of twelve IWW members on charges of treason-felony – allegedly, for planning to burn down Sydney businesses – focused further attention on the organisation. After the victory of the ‘No’ case, Hughes and other disappointed patriots would blame their defeat on an implausible assortment of enemies – including Irish, Germans and women – that also included the Wobblies. And while this position grossly exaggerated IWW influence and was purely opportunistic, Verity Burgmann argues that the extremism of the anti-conscription movement’s ‘radical flank’ made the tactics and demands much of the remainder of the anti-conscription move­ ment seem reasonable and moderate, thereby playing a role in its success.10 Another example of such an organisation – and one drawing on young militant working-class men in a similar manner to the IWW – was Broken Hill’s Labor Volunteer Army, formed in 1916 and comprising eligible men who took a pledge to resist any effort to conscript them even unto ‘imprisonment or death’.11 A considerably more moderate anti-war and anti-conscription organisation was the Australian Freedom League, which had been around since before the war, formed by Quakers in Adelaide in 1911 to oppose compulsory 8 9 10

11

Ibid., 196–9. Direct Action, 24 June 1916, 1. Verity Burgmann, ‘Syndicalist and Socialist Anti-Militarism 1911–18: How the Radical Flank Helped Defeat Conscription’, in Fighting Against War: Peace Activism in the Twentieth Century, ed. Phillip Deery and Julie Kimber (Melbourne: Leftbank Press, 2015), 55–78. Paul Robert Adams, The Best Hated Man in Australia: The Life and Death of Percy Brookfield 1875–1921, (Glebe: Puncher & Wattmann, 2010), 56.

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military training and claiming 55,000 members before its decline.12 It revived in 1915 in time to throw itself into the fight against conscription. The Australian Peace Alliance, established in Melbourne in 1915 as an umbrella organisation of various union, socialist, feminist and pacifist organisations, was another active anti-war and anti-conscriptionist organisation, with Fred Riley, already an experienced socialist agitator by 1916, becoming its busy Victorian secretary.13 Victorian Socialist Party members figured largely in a No-Conscription Fellowship – VSP secretary Bob Ross had been among its founders – while from mid-1916 the Labor Party and unions set up the structure and assembled the personnel to run a mass campaign against conscription. Each State would develop its own configuration of anticonscriptionist organisations, although Sydney and Melbourne were by far the most active centres. Jauncey thought anti-war agitation strongest in Melbourne, then the federal capital, anti-conscriptionism finding its heartland in Sydney.14 But the drama over conscription affected every city, town and village in the nation, where the passions and arguments played out in ways shaped by local and regional contexts.15 The face-to-face character of rural communities possibly gave an even sharper edge to the debate in smaller places, where the particular circumstances of individuals and families were widely known. Conscriptionists called their opponents disloyal and cowardly, but anti-conscriptionists found just as irresistible the temptation to wonder aloud why conscriptionists were not themselves at the front, acting out their strongly-held imperial patriotism. Material considerations also mattered. In farming districts, dependence on family labour was recognised as a possible stimulus to anti-conscriptionism, especially after the government’s ill-advised call-up of eligible men during the campaign. The arbitrary and sometimes harsh character of exemption court decisions gave members of these communities, as well as their city cousins, a taste of what life might be like in a conscriptionist Australia.16 Employers were also 12

John Barrett, Falling In: Australians and ‘Boy Conscription’ 1911–1915 (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1979), 111, 116. 13 Ballarat Star, 15 February 1915, 1; Labor Call, 6 May 1915, 10. 14 Jauncey, The Story of Conscription in Australia, 135, 200; Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics, 99. 15 Philip Payton, Regional Australia and the Great War: ‘The Boys from Old Kio’ (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2012), 7. 16 John McQuilton, Rural Australia and the Great War: From Tarrawingee to Tangambalanga (Carlton South: Melbourne University Press, 2001), ch. 4.

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divided on occasion over conscription; at Broken Hill in view of the needs of the local mines.17

The First Conscription Campaign, 1916 A mass movement against conscription came into existence while Prime Minister William Morris Hughes was absent from the country, mainly visiting Britain, in the first half of 1916. It relied ultimately on labour, the only social movement capable of creating such a broadly-based and ultimately successful campaign. Conscription represented the pinnacle in Australia of what would later be known as the politics of a ‘united front’: the coming together of a range of organisations and ideologies of labour and the left in a campaign for an agreed goal. Some of these groups supported the war and voluntary recruitment while others opposed both. Some wished to reform or civilise capitalism, others to overthrow it. Many embraced parliamentary methods; a few held them in contempt. But all could agree that conscription was an unwelcome imposition on Australian society. The specific nature of the threat they faced, the particular instrument that the government devised to decide the question – a plebiscite – and the censorship and other forms of state repression that formed the background and context of the campaign, all helped to produce a highly unusual degree of cooperation and consensus on the political left.18 Conscription had developed as a national issue in the second half of 1915 against the background of the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign, and an emerging sense that voluntary recruitment would be unable to meet the requirements of the Australian Imperial Force. The formation in New South Wales in September 1915 of a Universal Service League to lobby for conscription announced a drawing of battlelines on the home front; that this body included the Labor premier, William Holman, was an indication that there could be no single Labor response to the idea of conscription.19 Nick Dyrenfurth has claimed that the idea of compulsion was central to labour movement thought and seen in this way, its opposition to conscription for overseas service was not inevitable.20 The Melbourne-based federal Labor 17

Brian Kennedy, Silver, Sin, and Sixpenny Ale: A Social History of Broken Hill 1883–1921 (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1978), 141. 18 Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics, 103. 19 Joan Beaumont, Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2013), 146. 20 Nick Dyrenfurth, ‘“Conscription is Not Abhorrent to Laborites and Socialists”: Revisiting the Australian Labour Movement’s Attitude towards Military Conscription

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parliamentarian, Frank Anstey, who advocated the conscription of wealth as a just accompaniment to the conscription of men, aroused suspicions that his opposition to conscription was therefore merely contingent, a dangerous and ultimately untenable position for a labour movement leader as attitudes hardened during 1916.21 Yet it must be considered doubtful whether the actual implementation of measures to conscript wealth – which were widely discussed but never seriously considered by any wartime government – would have convinced much of the labour movement of the necessity or justice of conscription for overseas service. It is true, also, that there were some socialists who had supported compulsory military training for home defence before the war on the grounds that it was a democratic measure, less threatening to working-class freedom than a standing army or ‘an armed caste’.22 But there had also long been liberal, libertarian and civic republican strains in labour ideology, any of which was liable to arouse suspicions of an excessively powerful and untrammelled government, especially when aligned with suspicion or hostility to ‘militarism’. That a despotic, unaccountable state was a standing menace to the freedom of working people to act in defence of their class interests was a theme that ran right through anticonscriptionist propaganda. Mainstream labour movement bodies came out in opposition to conscrip­tion in the early months of 1916. The country’s largest and most powerful industrial organisation, the Australian Workers Union (AWU), unanimously passed a motion opposing conscription at its annual convention late in January. Queensland’s Labor-in-Politics Convention followed in March, with the Victorian Labor Party’s conference a few weeks later adopting an even stronger anti-conscriptionist resolution, one that presaged a confrontation with conscriptionist Labor politicians. New South Wales Labor resolved similarly in May. In the same month, an Interstate Trade Union Congress that claimed to represent 280,000 unionists declared ‘uncompromising hostility’

21 22

during World War I’, Labour History, no. 103 (November 2012): 145–64. But see Robin Archer’s argument in this volume that labour movement propagandists articulated liberal objections to conscription from an early stage in the war. Peter Love, ‘Frank Anstey: A Political Biography’ (PhD thesis, Australian National University, 1990), 303–4. Socialist, 15 September 1911, 1. For Blackburn, see also Socialist, 22 September 1911, 4; 29 September 1911, 1; 6 October 1911, 1; 17 November 1911, 1. For Bernard O’Dowd’s support for compulsory military training, see Socialist, 15 December 1911, 4 and 19 January 1912, 4. Maurice Blackburn eventually ‘resigned his membership of the [Victorian Socialist] Party, owing to the prominence given in this paper to the subject of anti-conscription’; Socialist, 5 September 1913, 3.

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to conscription. By this time, it was clear that the labour movement was heading for a major confrontation if the government attempted to introduce compulsory overseas service.23 These were the circumstances that confronted Hughes on his return from Britain at the end of July. While Hughes initially avoided the issue, there was a growing expectation that he would soon seek to introduce conscription.24 Protracted discussion in cabinet and caucus late in August resulted in narrow acceptance – by 23 votes to 21 in caucus, and five votes to four in cabinet – of a referendum to decide the matter. Hughes announced the decision in parliament on 30 August. But his subsequent inability to win over the labour movement to conscription ensured that there would a bitter and divisive campaign in the weeks leading up to 28 October vote.25 Joan Beaumont argues that the debate, which occurred in the context of the mass grief arising from the disasters on the western front, ‘has never been rivalled in Australian political history for its bitterness, divisiveness and violence’.26 All the same, one should not exaggerate the violence. Even allowing for the increasingly repressive government censorship and soldiers’ efforts to break up anti-conscriptionist meetings, civil violence did not break out to any appreciable extent.27 According to union and Labor Party official, E.J. Holloway, ‘men did suffer in short and sharp outbursts of violence … though fortunately the British weapon of fists was fairly uniformly adhered to’.28 He might have added that women, too, suffered. Vida Goldstein and Adela Pankhurst found themselves speaking from platforms that had been set on fire, and Pankhurst was attacked as she made her way in a gig from an anticonscriptionist meeting in country Victoria.29 The Age reported ‘scenes of the utmost disorder’ at a women’s anti-conscription march and rally on the Yarra Bank held about a week before the 1916 poll, when soldiers were ‘surrounded by a howling mob of about 500 men, eager to tear them to pieces or to throw 23 Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics, 102–3. 24 Sydney Morning Herald, 2 August 1916, reprinted in Conscription: The Australian Debate, 1901–1970, ed. J.M. Main (North Melbourne: Cassell Australia, 1970), 40–1. 25 Federal Parlimentary Labor Party, Minutes, 24–26 August 1916, in Caucus Minutes 1901–1949: Minutes of the Meetings of the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party, Volume 1 1901–1917, ed. Patrick Weller (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1975), 434–5; Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics, 105–11. 26 Beaumont, Broken Nation, 223. 27 Labor Call, 6 July 1916, 6. 28 E.J. Holloway, The Australian Victory over Conscription in 1916–17 ([Melbourne]: AntiConscription Jubilee Committee, 1966), 16. 29 Register (Adelaide), 19 October 1916, 7; Tribune (Melbourne), 26 October 1916, 3.

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them into the Yarra’.30 In reality, anti-conscriptionists were more likely to have been issuing a stern warning that any repetition of the attacks on women and children that had occurred on the march to the rally would meet with determined resistance. Anti-conscriptionist newspapers, in contrast with the pro-conscriptionist press, blamed ‘a squad of uniformed hooligans’ for what little disorder there was; soldiers had snatched placards away from women and children and thrown rotten eggs at the anti-conscriptionists during the march. Anti-conscriptionists, already accustomed to the disruptive tactics of soldiers, proved well capable of holding their own on this as on other occasions during the campaign.31 Demonstrators sometimes clashed violently with police; this had happened at the Broken Hill courthouse in September 1916, when hundreds of anticonscriptionists – male and female – assembled to protest against the arrest of Percy Brookfield and two other members of the Labor Volunteer Army.32 Police, however, were not invariably unhelpful to anti-conscriptionists. In the case of a Brisbane rally in October 1916, held in the only State where the government opposed conscription, police resisted the efforts of 200 soldiers to break up an anti-conscriptionist rally. The soldiers then turned their attention to the offices of the labour newspaper, the Daily Standard, breaking several windows with stones. Police did, however, manage to dissuade the excited mob from marching on Trades Hall. ‘The soldiers during the evening attracted a large crowd in their marches through the streets’, reported one journalist, ‘singing popular songs and cheering and hooting’.33 Where radicals were outnumbered, or politically isolated, the situation was more dangerous. Soldiers attacked, and damaged, the IWW Hall in Sydney on the evening of 8 October and while police dispersed the soldiers in the interests of law and order, the officer in charge clearly disliked the impression created that police were supporting the Wobblies. Militant antiwar organisations were frequently targeted by patriotic mobs and while the IWW was often effective in protecting its gatherings, it was unsuccessful on the Perth Esplanade, where a large crowd targeted an elderly Wobbly – presumably, Eureka veteran Monty Miller – and threw the speakers’ 30 31

Age, 23 October 1916, 8. Truth (Melbourne), 28 October 1916, 5; Tribune, 26 October 1916, 3. See also Judith Smart, ‘The Right to Speak and the Right to Be Heard: The Popular Disruption of Conscriptionist Meetings in Melbourne, 1916’, Australian Historical Studies 23, no. 92 (April 1989): 2013–19. 32 Kennedy, Silver, Sin, and Sixpenny Ale, 140. 33 Queensland Times (Ipswich), 14 October 1916, 8.

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platform into the river. In this instance, a small group of activists faced a large and hostile crowd in a strongly conscriptionist city.34 Some of the more notable acts of violence, such as the tarring and feathering of prominent activists, which one partisan anti-conscriptionist historian, Bertha Walker, would later mention in connection with the campaigns, actually occurred either before or after them, and were uncon­ nected with the issue of conscription. 35 Still, the threat of violence hung over the conscription demonstrations, to the extent that it unnerved (the, admittedly, somewhat easily unnerved) John Curtin, secretary of the Trades Union Anti-Conscription Committee. But the worst Curtin had to cope with was an egg in the back of the head.36 Eggs – well designed to create shock, humiliation and, especially where ‘mature’, discomfort – seem to have been a weapon of choice for both sides, a sign that even in a world war and economic recession Australia remained a land of plenty. Many people kept hens, normally a bounty for the breakfast table, now transformed into a backyard munitions supply. 37 In the Gippsland town of Sale, larrikins subjected Labor anti-conscriptionist Maurice Blackburn to a barrage of unripe peaches and apricots. All missed their target.38

Beyond the Great Man and Woman Historians have frequently told the story of anti-conscriptionism through leading figures such as Catholic prelate Daniel Mannix and Queensland Premier T.J. Ryan. Yet the emphasis on such personalities is misleading. Though significant in the 1917 campaign, neither Mannix nor Ryan was a major player in 1916. In 1966 E.J. Holloway, who was sufficiently involved in the campaigns in Melbourne to have known who mattered, identified Mannix, predictably, but also Charles Strong, the leader of the Australian Church, and Samuel Mauger, anti-alcohol campaigner and former Liberal Protectionist politician, as having done ‘much to help keep conscription out of Australia’.39 Mauger was certainly active as a speaker in the 1917 campaign and Strong was, alongside the likes of Frederick Sinclaire of Melbourne’s 34 Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism, 199; West Australian, 16 October 1916, 8. 35 See, for instance, Bertha Walker, Solidarity Forever! … A Part Story of the Life and Times of Percy Laidler – The First Quarter of a Century (Melbourne: The National Press, 1972), 114–15. 36 David Day, John Curtin: A Life (Sydney: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000), 226–8. 37 Holloway, The Australian Victory over Conscription in 1916–17, 16. 38 Peter Synan, Gippsland’s Lucky City: A History of Sale (Sale: City of Sale, 1994), 135. 39 Holloway, The Australian Victory over Conscription in 1916–17, 20.

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Free Religious Fellowship and the Congregationalist minister and pacifist Albert Rivett, one of the signatories to a manifesto of clergy condemning con­scription as un-Christian and tending to elevate state worship to a form of religion.40 But, again, there is little reason to consider any of these interventions of major significance to the outcome, especially as they figured in the second conscription referendum, not the more closely fought contest of the previous year. A striking feature of the 1916 campaign was that it was conducted for the most part by men and women known in labour and radical circles but barely beyond. Goldstein and (to a lesser extent) Pankhurst were exceptions; but the leading anti-conscriptionist men were more obscure figures at the time, and many have barely registered in the public record since. Thomas J. Miller, for instance, was an exceedingly active anti-conscriptionist, ‘an accredited delegate from the Inter-State Trade Union Congress, organizer of the Australian Freedom League, and delegate of the Australian Peace Alliance’. In late September 1916, Miller reported in the pages of the Socialist that he had recent­ly travelled 5000 miles, addressed about 50 meetings, and distributed 30,000 pamphlets. His travels took in Western Australia in early August, where he played an instrumental role in bringing together anti-conscriptionist forces in the State where they were weakest.41 Serving Labor parliamentarians were especially important outside the larger cities since they had at their disposal railway passes allowing free travel. Frank Anstey campaigned in Tasmania while in north-eastern Victoria, the sitting federal member for Indi, Parker Moloney, was at one point addressing three anti-conscriptionist meetings a day.42 His parliamentary colleague James Catts, who had been director of voluntary recruiting in New South Wales, an organiser of country recruiting marches, and a well-known supporter of compulsory military training for home defence, lent credibility to the cause because his positions emphasised that one could be anti-conscription yet pro-war. His was ‘a policy of Australia first, with a sympathetic desire to stand by the land of our fathers to the fullest extent, consistent with Australian obligations’.43 40

41 42 43

Ballarat Star, 19 December 1917, 4; Heidelberg News and Greensborough, Eltham and Diamond Creek Chronicle, 15 December 1917, 2; Labor Call, 13 December 1917, 7; C.R. Badger, The Reverend Charles Charles Strong and the Australian Church (Melbourne: Abacada Press, 1971), 146–7; Federal Independent, 15 December 1917, 3. Socialist, 29 September 1916, 1; J.R. Robertson, ‘The Conscription Issue and the National Movement in Western Australia June 1916–December 1917’, University Studies in Western Australian History, 3, no. 3 (October 1959): 10. Love, ‘Frank Anstey’, 290; McQuilton, Rural Australia and the Great War, 58. Arthur Hoyle, ‘Catts, James Howard (1877–1951)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.

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There is widespread recognition that Henry Boote, and the newspaper which he edited, the Australian Worker, played a critical part in the anticonscription campaigns; but it was the combination of institution and man that truly mattered. The AWU’s roots in rural Australia gave Boote and the Australian Worker’s propaganda an impressive geographical reach in areas where the press was otherwise overwhelmingly conscriptionist. The newspaper’s Sydney office is said to have pumped out a vast amount of material: 5,000,000 leaflets, more than 100,000 additional copies of the Australian Worker, half a million ‘How to Vote’ cards, 25,000 posters, and much else besides; large anti-conscriptionist cartoons from the Australian Worker figured in a December 1917 anti-conscriptionist street procession in Sydney.44 The political formation of Boote, an English migrant, seems to have included both working-class liberalism of the vaguely Gladstonian sort and the radical secularism of Charles Bradlaugh, with its powerful strain of libertarianism.45 This influence could hardly have been more obvious than in the following judgment, delivered during the 1916 referendum campaign: If conscription comes to pass, you have NO MORE FREEDOM THAN THE CATTLE IN THE SALEYARDS, waiting to be passed on to the butcher. You cease to be a free agent, endowed with thoughts, feelings, emotions, lifting you up to the level of the gods, and become A COMMON CHATTEL – a piece of property; a brainless, spiritless things, devoid of any directive will power, subject to the whims, caprices, or interests of somebody else.

Conscription, said Boote, would turn a man into someone else’s property – like a slave – and it subjected him to arbitrary power – ‘the whims, caprices, or interests of somebody else’.46 Boote’s extravagant libertarian rhetoric lent the anti-conscriptionist side a moral passion articulated with great eloquence, and most importantly, in a form capable of reaching vast numbers of voters. au/biography/catts-james-howard-5535/text9429, published first in hardcopy 1979, accessed online 6 December 2015; J.H. Catts, Australia Must Be Free!: Why We Cannot Accept Conscription. Official Reply to Prime Minister ([Sydney]: NSW No-Conscription Campaign Committee, n.d. [1917]). 44 Jauncey, The Story of Conscription in Australia, 223; Australian Worker, 17 December 1917, 8. 45 Ian Syson, ‘Henry Ernest Boote: Putting the Boote into the Australian Literary Archive’, Labour History, no. 70 (May 1996): 74–6. 46 Australian Worker, 5 October 1916, 15.

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Tyranny and Freedom A common attitude among Australian anti-conscriptionists after January 1916 was that in enforcing conscription, Britain had betrayed its own best traditions of liberty. As stories circulated among anti-conscriptionists in Australia – mainly courtesy of English newspapers – about the brutal treatment of conscientious objectors in Britain, as well as the use there and in France of soldiers as factory labour under ‘industrial conscription’, they recognised what might be in store if conscription were introduced in Australia.47 That anti-conscriptionists watched developments in Britain closely is beyond doubt, yet infrequently noted. At Broken Hill, the English migrant and radical activist Percy Brookfield told a meeting of Labor’s Volunteer Army: ‘England had got conscription hard and fast, and the result there had been starvation, misery, long hours, and a lot of bal[d]erdash about freedom’.48 A cottage meeting of women in Melbourne during the 1916 campaign, addressed by Doris Blackburn, included a reading of ‘cuttings from English papers that were very interesting … The ladies thanked Mrs. Blackburn, and promised to assist all in their power to prevent the Referendum being carried’.49 The Manifesto of the Australian Trade Union Congress held in the same city in May 1916 had begun not on a local note, but with the observation that in both Britain and France conscription had been used ‘to render null and void all the achievements of Trade Unionism’. The Manifesto went on to explain that conscription began ‘not in the seizure of the body for slaughter’ but in ‘the proclamation itself ’, from which moment ‘every subject in the prescribed ages is a potential subject of the sword’.50 The language deployed here, as in so many other examples of anticonscriptionist propaganda, has affinities with republicanism or civic human­ ism, in which the individual who is subject to the arbitrary rule of another is understood as a ‘slave’ rather than a free citizen. According to this view, it is sufficient that an individual has the power to interfere with the freedom of another for the liberty of the latter person to have been diminished. Whether or not one is dependent on another’s will is the critical measure of freedom; 47 Jauncey, The Story of Conscription in Australia, 146–8; Australian Worker, 12 October 1916, 12; Socialist, 20 October 1916, 12. 48 Quoted in Adams, Best Hated Man, 58. 49 Labor Call, 5 October 1916, 7. 50 Australian Trade Union Congress, Australian Trade Unionism and Conscription: Being Report of Proceedings of Australian Trade Union Congress, Together with the Manifesto of the National Executive, (Melbourne: Labor Call [Printer], 1916), 3.

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it is not necessary for someone actually to exercise such power in a direct or overt manner.51 Here, the anti-conscriptionist case was that the mere existence of a power to conscript a large portion of the male population, whether it was actually exercised over any particular person or cohort, would have a chilling effect on freedom in general: over individuals in their daily lives, but also over the union movement in its capacity as the organised expression of working-class interests. Since such power was to be handed to military authorities, the tyranny that conscription would establish would be quite foreign to any conventional understanding of British liberty. As Frank Brennan, a Catholic Labor member of the federal parliament, told a meeting in the Melbourne Town Hall, ‘[i]t was to preserve their liberty and the best traditions of Great Britain that they had taken the stand they had … Conscription was intended to rob them of the freedom for which their forefathers had bled and died’.52 That a politician steeped in the traditions of Irish-Catholic Australia could argue thus is an indication of the pervasiveness of such rhetoric. Bob Ross drew particular attention to the danger of military control to trade unionism when he asserted that ‘[w]hatever may be said in favour of conscription’ – and Ross clearly thought that little could be said for it – ‘it is unquestioned that conscription means military control’ under which both democracy and trades unionism ‘practically cease to operate’.53 The language of slavery had a long history in political rhetoric and had often figured prominently in many Australian protest movements, such as that to end convict transportation in the mid-nineteenth century as well as agitation against bonded Melanesian labour a few decades later. In the labour movement, the idea of ‘wage slavery’ was familiar enough and in the context of fears of ‘industrial conscription’, provided a link between hostility to the tyrannies of the state and capital. Moreover, anti-conscriptionists’ experiences of the arbitrary power of the state – and especially that of military authorities – were not merely theoretical by the time the issue of conscription emerged as a pressing national controversy. Rather, there had been an extended experience of censorship, numerous raids on radical and labour newspaper offices which continued during the campaign, and a more informal exercise of brute military force by soldiers who physically attacked anti-war activists and broke up meetings, seemingly with official 51 52 53

Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 50–1, 69. Truth (Melbourne), 28 October 1916, 5. Socialist, 20 October 1916, 2.

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T he Conscription Conflict and the Great War

impunity.54 It is a commonplace in the historiography that Hughes’ erratic and often ill-judged leadership was a factor of no small importance in under­ mining the conscriptionist position.55 Certainly, anyone inclined to worry about a government acquiring more power over its citizens than is healthy in a democracy was unlikely to find any reassurance in the fact that it would probably be Hughes making the decisions about how the government would use its expanded authority. His wild rhetoric, cavalier attitude to civil rights and obvious delight in power combined to add a powerful personal dimen­ sion to anti-conscriptionists’ fears of state despotism. Socialists, trade unionists, feminists, peace activists and anti-conscriptionists were concerned primarily with the erosion of freedom. As the Victorian Political Labor Council Manifesto declared during the 1916 referendum campaign, Two years ago Australia engaged in the war with Germany because she loved civil liberty and loathed tyranny. In those two years our country has seen that civil liberty for which she fought assailed by her own rulers. In those two years our country has seen that military tyranny against which she fought imitated by her own rulers. She has no longer free speech; she has no longer a free press. Public meetings, even private homes, have been invaded by police and armed soldiers executing military orders. The work of debasing Australia to the level of Germany has already gone too far. It is proposed to complete this task by – conscription.56

Union leaders believed a conscriptionist society would strangle the demo­ cratic right to meaningful individual and collective protest. One Victorian anti-conscriptionist, William Wallis, thought that a voluntary citizen army placed a check on the ‘development of tyranny among superior officers’ but ‘[c]onscription lets it loose in its worst form … Conscription is slavery of the worst sort’.57 Indeed, this was precisely what their own recent experience of the War Precautions Act was telling them, an impression confirmed by stories from 54 Jauncey, The Story of Conscription in Australia, 137–44. 55 See, for instance, John Connor, Peter Stanley and Peter Yule, The War at Home, The Centenary History of Australia and the Great War, Volume 4 (South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2015), 112. 56 Australian Worker, 5 October 1916, 5. 57 Labor Call, 12 October 1916, 4.

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Chapter Three

British socialists of life in wartime Britain. Philip Snowden, a Labour member of the British House of Commons, wrote to an Australian parlia­ mentarian in 1916 that ‘[t]he England we have known and loved for its tradition of civil and political liberty is passing away’. The Munitions Act, he explained, had instituted a form of industrial conscription while free speech and free criticism had been prohibited. Or as Snowden told Fred Riley, ‘Every prophecy we opponents of conscription made has been speedily and fully fulfilled already. The military are dominant everywhere and in everything’. Snowden’s comments were reproduced in the labour press.58

The Women’s Cause The language of anti-slavery had been prominent in the international campaigns for women’s rights, and it was easy enough for feminists to see how the war had reinforced the relationship between military service and citizenship – inevitably marginalising women – as well as unleashing male passions that rendered women more vulnerable than ever to violence. Even in a society that had delivered votes to women ahead of most of the world, the militarised society that many thought conscription would bring had the potential to subject women to new and even worse bonds than in the past. As Goldstein told an Adelaide audience, ‘With militarism in Australia the women would be looked upon, as in other conscription countries, merely as bearers of children – boys for the next war’.59 Accordingly, organisations such as the Women’s Peace Army and the Women’s Anti-Conscription Committee organised women’s efforts to oppose conscription. Women were also active in mixed-sex organisations. The role of prominent activists such as Goldstein, Pankhurst, Mary Grant, Cecilia John, Jean Daly and Bella Lavender has attracted the attention of historians from Jauncey in the 1930s to Joy Damousi half a century later, although rather less of the same during the interregnum when a more masculinist labour history had little to say about women.60 Historians have also noticed the way the campaigns – on both sides– appealed to women as mothers. John’s performances of ‘I Didn’t Raise My Son to Be a Solider’ were both celebrated and reviled. 58 59 60

Ibid., 2 November 1916, 6. Register (Adelaide), 19 October 1916, 7. The representative text is Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics. For female anticonscriptionists, see Joy Damousi, ‘Socialist Women and Gendered Space: The Anti-Conscription and Anti-War Campaigns of 1914–1918’, Labour History, no. 60 (May 1991): 1–15.

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T he Conscription Conflict and the Great War

The most famous piece of propaganda, The Blood Vote, attributed to the socialist W.R. Winspear but actually written by a journalist working for a pro-conscriptionist newspaper in Sydney, E. J. Dempsey, also appealed to women’s maternal instincts.61 One million copies were printed, with its striking image by the labour cartoonist Claude Marquet of a pencil dripping blood, a perplexed mother voting ‘Yes’, a demonic Billy Hughes standing behind leading her unto temptation:62

 

 

‘Why is your face so white, Mother? Why do you choke for breath?’ ‘O, I have dreamed in the night, my son, That I doomed a man to death.’

As befitted a socialist anti-war organisation, the Women’s Peace Army appealed to other sentiments as well, such as the need to ensure the ascen­ dancy of ‘Right’ rather than ‘Might’ and the threat of European-style militarism to the working class. Still, its anti-conscriptionist manifesto of October 1916 laid considerable stress on motherly feelings, in a campaign that on both sides increasingly sought to manipulate emotions already heightened by tension, distress and grief: As the Mothers of the Race, it is your privilege to conserve life, and love, and beauty, all of which are destroyed by war. Without them, the world is a desert. You, who give life, cannot, if you think deeply and without bias, vote to send any mother’s son to kill, against his will, some other mother’s son. You may, if you choose, send your own son, but you are guilty in the first degree if you take upon yourself the responsibility of forcing someone else’s son to break the Sixth Commandment, and, defying God, say to him, 61

Verity Burgmann, ‘Winspear, William Robert (1859–1944)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http:// adb.anu.edu.au/biography/winspear-william-robert-9155/text16163, published first in hard­copy 1990, accessed online 6 December 2015; Vane Lindesay, ‘Marquet, Claude Arthur (1869–1920)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/marquetclaude-arthur-7495/text13065, published first in hardcopy 1986, accessed online 6 December 2015. 62 Jauncey, The Story of Conscription in Australia, 203–4.

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Chapter Three THOU SHALT KILL.63

Women’s concerns for their menfolk undoubtedly motivated some to oppose conscription. Meetings of women were being held in Melbourne, explained Elizabeth Wallace, ‘to face this most dastardly attempt to take the freedom of the working man away from him’. There were so many women at an afternoon meeting in the Melbourne suburb of Northcote that the hall hired for the occasion proved too small, and the women took ‘the matter into their own hands’, storming ‘the main hall, which the courtesy of the Mayor made available’. After the meeting of nearly 1000 women, ‘a most extraordinary scene took place. Anxious mothers and wives crowded round the platform, seeking information, all eager to help with the canvass that is being carried on’.64 Women had particular reason to fear the consequences of a militarised society. While the war had elevated the idea of male chivalry, soldiers verbally and physically abused women who spoke publicly for peace and against conscription.65 In the Melbourne women’s march and demonstration already mentioned, one woman was said to have ‘had her head split open by a blow’ while another had a piece of her finger bitten off by a soldier. The socialist lawyer Alf Foster reported that one woman had pointed out to him ‘that men who would behave as these did … towards women of their own country, would be capable of anything if ever they got the chance in an enemy country’. 66 In a society that had been subjected to a barrage of stories concerning atrocities by German troops, many sado-sexual, this woman’s hint that Australian soldiers’ behaviour indicated that they, too, would attack women if given the opportunity, dramatised the threat posed by the militarisation they believed conscription would worsen.67

63 64 65

66 67

Woman Voter, 5 October 1916, 2. See also Pat Gowland, ‘The Women’s Peace Army’, in Women, Class and History: Feminist Perspectives on Australia 1788–1978, ed. Elizabeth Windschuttle (Melbourne: Fontana Collins, 1980), 228. Labor Call, 5 October 1916, 7. Peter Pierce, ‘Australian Chivalry: Australian Chivalry’, in Association for the Study of Australian Literature: Sixteenth Annual Conference 3–8 July 1994: Proceedings (Canberra: ASAL, 1995), 116–19; Damousi, ‘Socialist Women and Gendered Space, 1–15. Labor Call, 26 October 1916, 6; Socialist, 27 October 1916, 1; Damousi, ‘Socialist Women’, 13. Frank Bongiorno, The Sex Lives of Australians (Collingwood: Black Inc., 2012), 124–5.

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T he Conscription Conflict and the Great War

Keeping Australia White and Free At the head of the great anti-conscriptionist procession that wound its way through the streets of Sydney on 16 December 1917 was a motor-car displaying a large poster bearing a map of Australia emblazoned with the slogan: ‘VOTE NO: KEEP AUSTRALIA WHITE’.68 At this time, the White Australia Policy was understood in most of the labour movement not as a cause for shame or embarrassment, but as one of the most notable achievements of Australian democracy; an expression of the liberty that Australia’s people had won in order to make their country as they saw fit. A White Australia was regarded as the most distinctive expression of antipodean Britishness. So when Boote claimed that a result of the passing of conscription would be the stripping of white workers from the country and the abandonment of the White Australia Policy, he added that it was only through the latter that Australia could ‘hope to maintain its racial integrity, its democratic character, and its ethical and economic standards’.69 The arrival of a group of Maltese migrants on a ship in September 1916 provided anti-conscriptionists with an additional opportunity for propa­ ganda, fuelling rather implausible but – in the context of a bitter struggle – incendiary claims that they were cheap labour being introduced to replace conscripted men. Hughes was so concerned by the propaganda value of their arrival to his opponents that the government decided that a second ship carrying Maltese should not be allowed to land; they were temporarily sent to New Caledonia for a few weeks at the government’s expense.70 But William Wallis, the Melbourne anti-conscriptionist, pointed out in October that ‘[a]lready Maltese are being imported, and it is rumored Asiatics will soon be brought here to carry on the sugar industry in Queensland’.71 It is difficult to assess the effectiveness of such propaganda. John Hirst thinks the ‘bogey’ that conscription would lead to the end of the White Australia Policy ‘emerged late and bit hard’, but it is not clear on what basis he judges the hardness of its bite.72 It is true that alongside their claims about alleged plans to import cheap labour, anti-conscriptionists also did their best to insinuate a possible future military threat from Japan without 68 69 70 71 72

Australian Worker, 17 December 1917, 8. Ibid., 5 October 1916, 16. Ernest Scott, The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, Australia During the War, Vol. 11, (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, Fourth Edition, 1938 [1936]), 354–6. Labor Call, 12 October 1916, 4. Hirst, ‘Australian Defence and Conscription: A Re-assessment, Part I’, 616.

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Chapter Three

incurring the censor’s wrath by abusing the Empire’s Pacific ally. This was a favourite theme of Catts who, as the general organiser and director of the anti-conscriptionist campaign in New South Wales, was repeatedly censored and prosecuted for his efforts to draw attention to the supposed Japanese menace. But two could play this game, and Hughes also said that the White Australia Policy might, in future, face a challenge from an unnamed foe, and that its preservation ultimately depended on the might of the Royal Navy. On this basis, he suggested, Australians should vote for conscription to bolster the strength of the British Empire in its hour of need.73 In the context of the argument being developed here, what matters about anti-conscriptionist references to White Australia is less that they were racist – as they were – than that they were understood as one more way a tyrannous and arbitrary power would seek to subjugate the working class. A parallel case can be made in connection with the religious question, another staple of conscription historiography. Historians have often puzzled over whether Catholics were more inclined to vote ‘No’ because they were Catholic, or because they were (predominantly) working class. One way they have sometimes sought to solve this problem is by suggesting that an effect of the elevation of the Irish question during 1916 as a result of the Easter uprising in Dublin was that middle-class Catholics were now more inclined to join their working-class and trade unionist co-religionists in opposing conscription.74 The movement of the Coadjutor Archbishop of Melbourne, Daniel Mannix, towards anti-conscriptionism (and Irish republicanism) is sometimes understood in this way, although Val Noone has raised the possibility that Mannix was influenced through exposure to his workingclass congregation as parish priest in West Melbourne. Certainly, by 1917 Mannix’s rhetoric increasingly resembled that of labour radicals who presented the war as a capitalist quest for profit and an imposition on the working class.75 Such arguments, however, remain wedded to a materialist conception of the formation of political consciousness. In reality Mannix’s rhetoric, like that of so much of the anti-conscriptionist movement, deployed the familiar 73 74 75

Labor Call, 2 November 1916, 2. Alan D. Gilbert, ‘The Conscription Referenda, 1916–17: The Impact of the Irish Crisis’, Historical Studies 14, no. 53 (1969): 54–72; Michael McKernan, ‘Catholics, Conscription and Archbishop Mannix’, Historical Studies 17, no. 68 (1977): 299–314. Val Noone, ‘Class Factors in the Radicalisation of Archbishop Daniel Mannix, 1913–17’, in Labour and the Great War: The Australian Working Class and the Making of Anzac, a special issue of Labour History, ed. Frank Bongiorno, Raelene Frances and Bruce Scates, no. 106 (May 2014): 189–204.

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T he Conscription Conflict and the Great War

language of liberty. In the Clifton Hill speech of 16 September 1916 that was his first public statement on the issue, Mannix described conscription as ‘a hateful thing … almost certain to bring evil in its train’. Those who had proposed it, he suggested, had ‘misjudged the temper of the Australian people … and their passionate love for freedom’.76 More than a year later, reflecting on the significance of the ‘No’ victory in 1916, he said that it had shown ‘Australia was a democratic country, and … there was no room for slavery or conscription’.77 A few weeks later, he warned against those ‘who aspired to be Czars of Australia … who desired to exercise a sovereignty and a control over the people that the kings and emperors of the old world would not attempt’. ‘If the people were to slow to act’, he added, ‘Australia, instead of being a free country, would be reduced to a state of abject submission’.78 These ideas – reflecting an antipathy to excessive state power that belonged to mainstream Catholic social thought – also fitted the rhetoric of anticonscriptionist activists of a less exalted status than Mannix.

The Second Conscription Campaign, 1917 If judged on the basis of the trail of propaganda left behind, the second conscription referendum campaign held in 1917 seems even more vicious than its counterpart of the year before. Ernest Scott believed that ‘[t]he violence which characterised the first conscription campaign in 1916 was exceeded by that of the second in 1917’, held ironically during the ‘season of good-will’ just a few days before Christmas.79 Jauncey thought the atmosphere on the day itself, 20 December, ‘not so tense’ as 28 October 1916 because there was greater certainty about the outcome of the 1917 vote. Moreover, although it is true that, as in the 1916 campaign, ‘the violence was limited and no one was killed’, Jauncey went too far in claiming ‘that the heat of the two referenda was accommodated by no violence of any sort’.80 At one meeting in north-eastern Victoria in 1917, a pro-conscription returned soldier landed a series of punches on his anti-conscriptionist cousin, an incident that dramatised the ability of this issue to divide families.81

76 Argus, 18 September 1916, 6. 77 Catholic Press (Sydney), 15 November 1917, 21. 78 Argus, 30 November 1917, 9. 79 Scott, Australia During the War, 415. 80 Connor, Stanley and Yule, The War at Home, 310. 81 McQuilton, Rural Australia and the Great War, 91.

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Chapter Three

Both sides in the conscription controversies had developed an appre­ ciation of the propaganda value of soldier opinion in the period between the two plebiscites. For anti-conscriptionists, to be able to demonstrate that brave Anzac warriors opposed compulsion was a valuable defence against accusations of disloyalty. In 1916, the armed forces vote was sufficiently close, with 45 per cent voting ‘No’, to embarrass Hughes and the conscriptionists when the figures were belatedly released in 1917. 82 A Returned Soldiers No-Conscription League emerged in time for the second campaign to reinforce the impression that large numbers of Anzacs opposed conscription. 83 Colonel Richard Crouch, a former Liberal and future Labor parliamentarian, was President of the Victorian branch of the league and played a major role in organising a ‘No’ voice for returned men.84 By the time the 1917 referendum campaign commenced, several vocal, high-profile anti-conscriptionists were in prison; notably Pankhurst and Tom Barker of the IWW, as well as a host of his comrades.85 This was one way of dealing with the opposition. But the national profile of Mannix (now Arch­bishop of Melbourne) and T.J. Ryan, as well as the growing fervour of anti-Hughes sentiment, shifted the manner in which the anti-conscriptionist campaign was fought. The second referendum campaign was defined rather more obviously than the first by big personalities and the titanic clashes between them. By 1917 the mutual loathing of Hughes and Mannix had developed into one of the great political duels of twentieth-century Australia.86 There was also the memorable confrontation of Hughes and Ryan. A particular point was the federal authorities’ seizure of the Queensland Hansard after Ryan read into it an anti-conscriptionist speech of his that had been censored. The Queensland Premier made great play with Hughes’s efforts to silence him. Insult was added to injury when Hughes found himself on the receiving end of a display of egg-power in the Darling Downs centre of Warwick. After a police sergeant refused to bow to Hughes’ order that he arrest the man who had thrown the egg (it had lodged in the Prime Minister’s hat), Hughes considered that he had further evidence that Queensland under the 82 Connor, Stanley and Yule, The War at Home, 113. 83 See its Manifesto, Woman Voter, 6 December 1917, 1–2. 84 Jauncey, The Story of Conscription in Australia, 285. 85 Jauncey, The Story of Conscription in Australia, 315. 86 Brenda Niall, Mannix (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2015), ch. 4.

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T he Conscription Conflict and the Great War

sponsorship of its wicked anti-conscriptionist government had become a cesspit of disloyalty.87 By the end of 1917, with the help of Hughes’ intemperate behaviour and inflammatory rhetoric, Ryan and Mannix had been transformed into national leaders. Enthusiastic Sydney crowds on 16 December hailed Ryan as ‘Queensland’s noblest son’ as well as a future Prime Minister as he passed through the city, ‘bowing from side to side like some great general of olden times passing in triumph through the streets of Rome’. In the Domain he addressed a crowd, estimated at 100,000, condemning military compulsion as a prelude to industrial compulsion, extolling the virtues of the voluntary system, and declaring that ‘[w]e must see that Australia is kept white’.88 Mannix, too, gave anti-conscriptionist speeches to overflowing audiences. In Melbourne’s Exhibition Building on 28 November he called on his audience, not for the first time, to put Australia first, and the empire second.89 It is testament to the White Australia Policy as an emblem of Australian freedom and democracy that even Mannix now brought it to the fore: The sun never sets upon the Empire, with its many coloured races. But we, a handful of whites in a huge continent, insist on a White Australia policy (Applause.) Our coloured fellow-citizens of the Empire ask for an entry. But no, not even for the Empire’s sake do we lift the embargo. (Applause.) Australia is first, and the Empire, with its coloured people and its Allies, have to fall into a second place. (Applause.)90

Mannix’s treatment of race was considerably more measured than many labour anti-conscriptionists, but few in the audience could have missed his message that the very same sense of national interest that dictated the White Australia Policy should also produce a ‘No’ vote.

Conclusion The defeat of conscription has long occupied a place of pride in the mythology of the Australian left. It has also attracted many studies. From its origins as a recognisable branch of literature in classical Greece, history has defined itself as a form of truth-telling in the face of myth’s power over the imagination. 87 88 89 90

D.J. Murphy, T.J. Ryan: A Political Biography (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1975), 329–31. Sydney Morning Herald, 17 December 1917, 8; Australian Worker, 17 December 1917, 8. Argus, 6 November 1917, 6. Advocate (Melbourne), 8 December 1917, 13.

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Chapter Three

Yet our understanding of anti-conscriptionism has been obscured, in part, by the myth-busting of academic historians who turned their attention to conscription from the 1960s. They have often been preoccupied with excavating the layers of economic interest and industrial motive that they assumed the rhetoric of anti-conscriptionism had been devised to mask. In adopting this approach, they have missed the intense intellectual and emotional attachment to freedom, as the anti-conscriptionists understood it, which lent the campaigns much of their passion. The campaigns over conscription were imbued with the grief and anxiety of a society at war, yet they were also colourful and exciting, occasions for marching and singing, for rallies, concerts and torchlight processions, for compelling oratory, for the display of banners, placards and buttons, for the sporting of sandwich boards bearing clever slogans, and, among women who were increasingly at the heart of the enterprise, for the wearing of graceful sashes of purple, white and green. Such occasions could sometimes be a little frightening; yet they contained the pleasures of joining with others in a common cause, and the frisson of facing a little but not too much danger while fighting for freedom and democracy.

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Cha pte r Fou r

U N I V ER S I T I E S A N D C ONS CR I P T ION The ‘Yes’ Campaigns and the University of Melbourne Joy Damousi

‘No event in the history of the Commonwealth of Australia’, Leslie Jauncey writes in The Story of Conscription, his classic study of the conscription referendums, ‘created more feeling and interest in the community than the two referenda in 1916 and 1917’. Jauncey considered the importance of his work as ‘compiling an accurate history of the development of the anticonscription movement in Australia’.1 In the century that has passed since the 1916 referendum, there has been no equivalent work on the pro-conscription campaign, nor has quite the same enthusiastic conviction been expressed over this period about the need to document the movement for the Yes vote. While there have been many individual studies undertaken – largely through biographies of key figures such as such as Billy Hughes2 – or organisations like the Australian Women’s National League, National Council of Women (NCW), the Protestant Churches, and the Imperial Round Table3 – we await a systematic and detailed study of those who supported conscription, 1 2 3

L.C. Jauncey, The Story of Conscription (Sydney: Macmillan, 1935), xix. L.F. Fitzhardinge, The Little Digger 1914–1953: William Morris Hughes: A Political Biography, Vol.2 (London: Angus and Robertson, 1979). See Judith Smart, ‘Eva Hughes: Militant Conservative’, in Double Time: Women in Victoria – 150 Years, eds. Marilyn Lake and Farley Kelly (Ringwood: Penguin, 1985),179–89; Judith Smart, ‘Women Waging War: The National Council of Women of Victoria 1914–1920, Victorian Historical Journal, 85 no. 1(2015):61–82; Leonie Foster, High Hopes: The Men and Motives of the Australian Round Table (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1986); Michael McKernan, Australian Churches at War:

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Chapter Four

and of why and how they did so.4 The Yes vote is invariably discussed in terms of why it lost, rather as a set of arguments or as a movement in its own right.5 As a result, the Yes case has been far less analysed and examined in the histories of the conscription campaigns than the No campaign.6 In this chapter, I focus on the activism of a group of academics who became directly involved in the conscription debates. Academics have not commonly been discussed in the history of conscription but are worthy of examination in their own right, I argue, for three reasons. The first is that while the role of academics and students in the Great War has been the subject of discussion in the British context – more specifically, the service young men from Cambridge and Oxford gave to the war effort – relatively little has been written on the arguments advanced by scholars in Australia.7 This was an issue that deeply moved many academics; for some it was the only political question on which they campaigned publicly throughout their careers. Even for those who believed the University should be a politically neutral place, the war posed such deeply moral questions that they felt the need to take a stand. Importantly, their arguments in favour of conscription varied – from an extreme position that advocated expulsion of German ‘aliens’ to more liberal-minded views. The second reason is that these scholars emerged from a nineteenth century liberal tradition that cherished the rights of the individual above all else. But conscription appeared to contradict this ideal by insisting that conscription was a legitimate form of coercion where the rights of the individual were temporarily subordinated to the state. Throughout the debates of 1916 and 1917, academics struggled to reconcile this apparent contradiction. In addition, the Great War forced several of these scholars to think of Australia’s place in the world in ways not previously possible. The long term political impact of the war and the debates around conscription shaped this

4 5 6 7

Attitudes and Activities of the Major Churches 1914–1918(Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1980); Alan Gilbert, ‘Protestants, Catholics and Loyalty: An Aspect of the Conscription Controversies, 1916–17’, Politics, 6, no.1 (1971):15–25. For recent work on conscription and war more broadly, see Joan Beaumont, Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War (Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 2013). K.S. Inglis, ‘Conscription in Peace and War, 1911–1945’, in Conscription in Australia, eds. Roy Forward and Bob Reece (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1968), 39–40. J.M. Main, ed., Conscription: The Australian Debate, 1901–1970 (North Melbourne: Cassell Australia, 1970), mainly includes material on the No case. There is little scholarship on academics and conscription; but see John Moses, ‘The Mobilisation of the University of Queensland 1914–1915 or How Academics Acted’, Journal of the War Memorial, no. 20 (1992):11–17.

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T he Conscription Conflict and the Great War

generation of scholars in fundamental ways, producing a new form of lib­ eral­ism which more than ever before was shaped by an internationalism defined by the killing fields of the war. There was a greater urgency and immediacy to their international outlook, evidenced by their even more intense political engagement after the war. This was apparent, in particular, in their engagement with the League of Nations Union in the postwar period. The League served as a platform for their optimistic activism in their search for an enduring peace. This chapter focuses on the University of Melbourne where there was both a range of activism − academics were active both on and off campus − and a spectrum of pro-conscriptionist views. Before considering this group I sketch the views of the best known supporter of conscription at the time, Billy Hughes, and those of one of the least known group of supporters, the medical fraternity.

Billy Hughes Hughes adopted a particular approach to the public advocacy of conscription. In style and in substance he cut a dramatic figure. The leader of the Labor Party opened the Yes campaign in September 1916 at the Sydney Town Hall. It was the first of many public meetings where Hughes would outline the Yes case. His message was simple, consistent and uncompromising. The Allies were now on the offensive and a larger effort was required to bring victory. There was a real threat of German victory and if that occurred, Australia would lose its freedom. Without further reinforcements, the British Empire was destined for collapse and Australia would fall with it. It was the obligation of all citizens to defend their country. Australia and Britain stood as one: In this war no Australia citizen can be for Australia who is not also for Great Britain and the Empire … This war is going to determine the destiny of every man and woman in Australia. There are men in Australia who say ‘we have done enough; we are safe’. Yes, they are safe, but only behind barricades of dead, and dying men of their own race. (Cheers).

The fiery speeches and colourful propaganda of the supporters of the No vote are often recalled. Here is how Hughes described those who opposed conscription: – 94 –

Chapter Four The objections to the Government proposals are many and changeable. They are hatched out like a swarm of monstrous insects buzzing throughout the land. They live for a day, and although they are killed by night, another swarm comes next morning, whispering into confiding ears some new and insidious statement. The objectors say they hope that the Allies will win, and that they are willing to do anything to this end except that which has to be done.8

Hughes’ supporters responded to his speeches with enthusiasm. ‘Men flung their hats into the air, and women jumped up on to the seats and waved handkerchiefs’.9 Hughes did not underestimate the women’s vote and spoke at gatherings of women only meetings. At one such meeting in October 1916, women came out in their thousands. The pro-conscription Argus reported that at one of these gatherings Hughes addressed the largest gathering of women ever seen in Sydney at the Town Hall … The crowd was so great that the normal seating capacity was exceeded by nearly 1000 persons. The meeting was most enthusiastic and the Prime Minister received a great welcome. The women rose and waved handkerchiefs and flags for several minutes’.10

The Yes campaigners expected to win. With responses such as these, and with such attendances, it is easy to see why. The intensity of these events was palpable. Hughes’ style generated a heightened energy that aimed to inspire men and women to support conscription. But this was more than a public performance: conscription was an issue in which he fundamentally believed. Hughes’ fury at the defeat of both referendums consumed him and he made his distain known not only in public, but also in private. In January 1918, Hughes wrote to Keith Murdoch, his confidant and pro-conscription publicist among the troops, of his crushing disappointment: I’ve been awfully upset over the Referendum and its aftermath. The result was a bitter pill to swallow … I have been through many Hells since I saw you last but in some respects the last month or 6 weeks has been the bitterest and worst of all … How do I account for the Australian vote say you? Well Sinn Fein I.W.W selfishness and sentimental vote of the women: AND WAR-WEARINESS!!! War-weariness of a people 8 9 10

Argus, 14 October 1916, 17. Ibid. Bendigo Advertiser, 7 October 1916, 11.

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T he Conscription Conflict and the Great War who have escaped all the consequences of this awful war! But there it is. And upon my head these rotters have visited the consequences of Australia’s failure to do her duty.11

Although deeply despondent about the result, Hughes knew that opposition to conscription in Australia was not new. Prior to the war, when a form of conscription for a civilian army was introduced, there was open hostility to the scheme. With the unexpected defeat of Russia by Japan in 1905, the anxiety of an expansionist Japan in the Pacific raised concerns about Australia’s military vulnerability.12 In 1911, the Deakin government intro­ duced compulsory military training for boys and young men aged 12–25, although Alfred Deakin himself was reluctant to adopt the scheme. John Barrett describes Deakin’s announcement as a ‘sad necessity and a proud appeal to citizenship’.13 Even so, on the eve of the war, Australia had established a system of military training. But the community was divided. The idea of compulsory training, wrote one correspondent to the Advertiser, was ‘a standing disgrace to our intelligence and to the Empire to which we belong’. This compulsion entailed a moral problem, for rather than teaching ‘our boys to value life as a sacred trust’, the ‘susceptibility of their nature becomes blunted by their being taught the best means to destroy life’.14 Parents were urged to resist the compulsion, which they did in large numbers. ‘Would we have our sons trained for this?’ one critic asked. ‘A thousand times, No! Far better they were never born’.15 Whether or not these critics changed their minds they were questioning moral aspects of military compulsion. Boy conscription, as it became known, was a policy that Hughes in 1911 had enthusiastically supported. It prefigured his support for the Yes case – a case that he has come almost singularly to represent. But conscription also attracted open support from groups that did not often engage publicly in political debate. One such group was to be found amongst the medical profession. Their approach to the issue was quite different to that of Hughes. 11

12 13 14 15

Quoted in Fitzhardinge, The Little Digger, 306. For the most complete account of Hughes’ relationship with Murdoch, see Tom D.C. Roberts, Before Rupert: Keith Murdoch and the Birth of a Dynasty (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2015), Chs 2–4. J.A. La Nauze, Alfred Deakin: A Biography 2 (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1965), 515–34. John Barrett, Falling In: Australians and ‘Boy Conscription’ 1911–1915 (Sydney: Hale &Iremonger, 1979), 65. Advertiser, 23 September 1911, 17. Ibid., 5 September 1910, 11.

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The Medical Profession Only rarely did the medical fraternity engage in the discussion of political issues relating to the war, and then only in relation to conscription. Though unconditionally patriotic, their support was neither vociferous nor passionate. In October 1916, a number of medical officers serving at the front published an open letter. It asked: ‘Can a woman vote to send another woman’s son to his death?’ The signatories argued a medical case for conscription: As army medical officials who have seen service abroad, we feel it our duty to impress upon all members of the community that the actual deaths in our army … occur not only from mortal wounds, but also from several forms of infectious and exhausting diseases, such as dysentery, pneumonia, meningitis, and para-typhoid fever. If men are not given periods of rest from trench life, if companies are not relieved by the arrival of reinforcements to take their place at the proper time, then the physical resistance of the men is lowered by strain and exhaustion, they become more liable to disease, more liable to die from such diseases, and more liable to die from serious wounds.

The doctors appealed to women to send their sons so that others might be saved. ‘Many of our finest men would not report sick: but held on, literally unto the death, in the trenches helping their mates, awaiting for reinforcements which never arrive, or arrive too late’. The introduction of conscription was a matter of life and death, the aim being to prevent deaths by bringing men back to hospital and allowing them to convalesce: If they are not relieved the spirit of our Australian soldier will not let them withdraw from positions they have won until their bodies are worn out. In a fine army nothing lessens the war wastage of life so surely as sufficiency of men.16

Public engagement did not end with this appeal. Doctors believed so strongly that there should be conscription that, in July 1917, the medical profession conducted its own plebiscite suggesting the government be request­ed to introduce legislation imposing compulsory enlistment of its members in Australia for service in the AIF and overseas.17 The NSW branch of the British Medical Association, which initiated the vote, argued 16 17

Ibid., 14 October 1916, 18. Western Argus, 5 June 1917, 8.

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that the task of providing adequate medical service for the armed forces was becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. If compulsory recruitment were not introduced, delivering medical treatment would be ‘cumbersome, slow, uncertain and costly’.18 A vote was taken. Some 68 per cent of the medical men in Australia replied to the question of whether the government should introduce conscription for doctors. Of these, according to the report in the Medical Journal of Australia (MJA), 74.28 per cent favoured the profession being conscripted for war service. 19Acting Prime Minister William Watt said it was highly unlikely this would be approved because the vote was not unanimous and because the government was opposed to conscription unless the people agreed to it.20 The MJA ‘expressed disappointment that the loyal request of a majority of the medical profession was refused’. It urged its readers to volunteer.21 Although academics were more likely than doctors to join in the fray of political debate, they did not typically embroil themselves in political causes. For many of them the issue of conscription proved to be the exception. Academics at the University of Melbourne provide a case study of how the issue moved many of them to move beyond the cloisters of privilege.

University of Melbourne On 5 November 1917, a meeting of the University of Melbourne Council to consider the burning question of the day – that of conscription, and in particular, what action the University might take to ensure that its own students enlisted − took place at the Melbourne Town Hall. Passed unan­ imously was a motion that students of military age and fitness should seriously consider whether they ought not as soon as possible to offer their services at the front. No con­ siderations of commercial or professional advantage should be allowed to stand in the way of this plain duty.22

An amendment, debated but not passed, referred to the examples shown ‘by Oxford and Cambridge, the Scottish universities, and Dublin University in 18 Sydney Morning Herald, 15 May 1917, 8. 19 Age, 29 August 1918, 4. 20 Ibid. 21 Quoted in Age 29 August 1918, 4. 22 Argus, 6 November 1917, 4.

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the matter of enlistment, and … that the record of Melbourne University did not compare very favourably with those of the other seats of learning’.23 The council was divided over the lengths to which the University should or could go in insisting that male students enlist. Alexander Leeper, the author of the defeated amendment, warden of Trinity College, founder of the collegiate system at the University and outspoken pro-conscriptionist,24 was emphatic about the role of the University in relation to the war. The University should ‘aspire to be both the brain and conscience of the nation, and the public was entitled to look to it for guidance in public matters when the Empire was in such grave peril’. It was a disgrace that there had been a record attendance at the Derby. [M]any of the University class rooms’ he reminded his colleagues, ‘were crowded with men who were eligible for the front’. Leeper believed Ormond College had sent the correct message in not accepting any student who could not give good reason for not enlisting. He wanted the University to adopt a similar edict.25 While Leeper had supporters for his stance of direct action, the views of others was far more tempered, not least because mass enlistment would have severely hindered the way the University functioned. The Dean of Medicine, Harry Allen, warned the Council that if they had encouraged their first year medical students to enlist, the Faculty would ‘have been in a deplorable condition now’. If the war continued for another five years, he warned, the university would ‘need every medical student they could get hold of ’. At the present time, he ‘would gladly see’ fifty first-year and thirty secondyear student enlist, but he was clearly nervous about what an escalation of numbers enlisting might mean for the University, and for the medical courses in particular.26 In the last year of the war a number of medical students attempted to expel all eligible men from the medical students’ society who had not enlisted.27 Perhaps Leeper had a point when comparing Melbourne to universities in Britain: Melbourne had 1,100–1,300 students enrolled in every year of war whereas the numbers at Oxford had declined from 3,000 to 350.28 23 Ibid. 24 John Poynter, Doubts and Certainties: A Life of Alexander Leeper (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1997), 386–91. 25 Argus, 6 November 1917, 4. 26 Ibid. 27 Geoffrey Blainey, A Centenary History of The University of Melbourne (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1957), 140. 28 Ibid.

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Allen’s colleague, the prominent law professor, William Harrison Moore, was as active as Leeper and Allen in supporting the Yes case; but, unlike them, he took the case beyond the University. Moore was one of a group of aca­demics who prepared leaflets, spoke in the suburbs and in country areas, and wrote articles in the metropolitan and country press. But Moore thought it ‘a breach of his duty to use his place in the lecture room to talk to students about the duty of enlisting’. It would be like ‘shifting the burden from the shoulders of those to which it belonged on to those to which it did not belong’.29 In their support for conscription, Moore, Leeper and Allen were joined by Jessie Webb, the high profile Classics lecturer. Women academics were rare. In the sea of men wearing double-breasted jackets under their academic gowns, they stood out. Webb was accustomed to public attention for other reasons as well. Her trips to Greece to study the ancient world were often reported in the local press and she regularly gave public lectures on Ancient Greece. She was accustomed to public speaking and addressing audiences about her trips to Greece to study ancient ruins. But these comparatively benign forums would not have prepared her for the ferocity of the conscription debates. While the University had been the forum for many public debates, the conscription issue took this to a new intensity. The University of Melbourne prided itself as an upholder of the liberal tradition of the university famously enunciated by John Newman in The Idea of a University first published in 1852. For over 60 years, the University had ‘contributed aggressively to the social, political, cultural, and educational debates’ that ‘had convulsed Australia during the last one hundred and fifty years’.30 Conscription was one such debate. University staff supported conscription, but they also argued for a liberalism that insisted on individual rights. Moore exemplified this position. He was educated at Cambridge and appointed to the University in 1892. A conservative, Moore was also an energetic advocate of law reform. He was author of The Constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia (1902) and Acts of State in English Law (1906). He was a member of the Imperial Federation League before the outbreak of the war, and of the Round Table. Steadfastly imperialist, Moore was resistant to campaigns for an Australian national identity.31 Moore’s wife, Edith, was 29 30 31

Argus, 6 November 1917, 4. R.W. Selleck, The Shop: The University of Melbourne, 1850–1939 (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2003), 11. James Cotton, The Australian School of International Relations (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 22.

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a leading participant in numerous organisations that engaged in the con­ scription debates. These included the NCW, the Housewives’ Association, and the League of Women Voters of Victoria. Fiercely independent, she omitted the conventional vow of obedience during their wedding ceremony at the Toorak Wesleyan Church, fought for women’s suffrage and was a part of the movement to establish the Queen Victoria Hospital for Women.32 The Moores represented the heart of Melbourne’s establishment and they drew the ire of the left especially during the war. The Labor Call satirised Edith’s apparent complaint that meat was hard to come by during the war, especially ‘brains and tongues’. ‘As regards the brains’, quipped the paper, ‘the recent “Win–the–War” victory [the conservatives’ win at the national elections] is proof of their scarcity; but, as to tongues, have you ever tried a general meeting of the Women’s National League, Mrs. H.M?’.33 Jessie Webb was one of the Moores’ closest allies in the conscription cause. Graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1902, Webb attained first-class honours in history and political economy, as well as logic and philosophy. In 1904 she completed her Master of Arts. Appointed as a night lecturer in the History Department in 1908, Webb tutored in history and political economy from 1901 to 1912 at Trinity College. In 1913, she was appointed full-time lecturer. On the eve of the war she was lecturing in Ancient and British history.34

Australia: The ‘Most Advanced’ Democracy In 1917, during the second referendum campaign, Moore and Webb put forward a set of arguments in support of conscription. It was democracy that was on trial in this war, they argued, and Australia was failing her allies and her responsibilities by not adopting conscription. As the ‘most advanced’ of democratic nations, Australia could have no neutrality in this war. It was a testimony to the freedoms Australians enjoyed that they were called on to ‘vote on the question which everywhere else had been decided by Governments’. It was the responsibility of all citizens, therefore, to show themselves worthy of these freedoms and to not strike a blow against democracy. Conscription was 32 33 34

Loretta Re, ‘Moore, Sir William Harrison (1867–1935)’, in Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol 10: 1891–1939, Bede Nairn and Geoffrey Serle, eds. (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1986), 573–75. Labor Call, 28 June 1917, 2. Susan Janson, ‘Jessie Webb and the Predicament of the Female Historian’, in The Discovery of Australian History 1890–1939, eds. Stuart Macintyre and Julian Thomas (Carlton: Melbourne University Press 1995), 91–110.

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not a threat to such liberties; on the contrary, a Yes vote was a vote for a ‘free Australia’. There were many obligations attached to enjoying this freedom: We owe it to our boys who left as free men, that they shall have a chance to return. We owe it to those who freely chose the path of duty to show that we hold their lives as sacred as those who have held back. We owe it in justice to our dead and to those who are mourning the loss of sons, brothers, husbands or lovers that their sacrifice shall not be in vain. Our whole national future depends on the common acceptance of the duties along with the rights of citizenship … Compulsory service alone can end the conflicts between classes and creeds and families as to which of them has done its share. Such conflicts, if allowed to persist, will poison our social life, dominate our politics and threaten our capacity for self-government.

It was the responsibility of each citizen not simply to concern themselves with individual rights; their responsibility was to identify with the nation. They should, therefore, vote Yes: ‘I am myself, but I am also the nation. It is the NATION half of me that speaks at the Referendum.’35

German Victory and White Australia A No vote was a vote for Germany, opening up the real possibility that Australia would become a German colony. Under German rule all freedoms, including the freedoms of a democracy, would be lost: Australia as a German colony would be merely … soil to grow the things of which Germany is in need, a market for things of which she has a surplus. It would not be what it has been to us and to Great Britain – a nation of human beings shaping their lives in accordance with their ideals and standards of welfare.

Australians would be ‘simply instruments of production, and their welfare would be subservient to productive efficiency’. In tandem with relinquishing 35

Our Cause, authorized by W.H. Moore and J. Webb; W. Harrison Moore Papers, University of Melbourne Archives.

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these freedoms, a No vote would threaten the much cherished White Australia policy as cheap coloured labour would flood Australia. ‘If and where coloured labor was more productive than white, colored labor would be used’. Arguments about Australians welfare would be ignored as ‘senti­ mental’. German scientists and organisers might well determine that the best method of developing Australia’s resources was by a colored race directed and controlled by German officials, bankers, managers, and scientists. In another forum Moore elaborated on the real dangers of living under the Kaiser. Press restrictions and ‘limitations upon the rights of public meeting and association, which even as war measures try our patience to the utmost’, were ‘ordinary parts of the Prussian system’. Not only political freedoms but spiritual freedoms would disappear as well. These included a nation’s history and traditions: ‘If you rob a nation of its traditions you kill its soul’. 36

Women and the ‘Blood Vote’ In 1917, opponents of conscription had published THE BLOOD VOTE − a powerful poem directed at women. The poem, by W.R. Winspear and illustrated by Claude Marquet, asks how a mother can send another mother’s son to his death.37 Harrison and Webb sought to counter this pamphlet with one of their own. The anti-conscriptionist, they told mothers, knows ‘our weak spot and he does not spare us’. But the argument of the anticonscriptionist debased motherhood; it appealed to a ‘selfish, solicitous motherhood’. The anti-conscriptionist also sang ‘I didn’t raise my son to be a solider’, I raised my son to be a mother’s ‘pride and joy’. But there were wider responsibilities of mothers. ‘Have we really brought up our sons just to be [our] ‘joy and pride’? What pride could we have in them, if they shrink back in inglorious safety when the greatest call comes? But no! It is not for ourselves that we have brought up our children. They are ours in trust only. They are ours that we may teach them the traditions of a free people – to love Freedom, to fight for it, to look Death in the face and be unafraid. Conscription is the fairest and justest way of apportioning services

36 37

W. Harrison Moore, ‘The Forum: The issue and Australia’s Freedom’, nd, newspaper cutting, 12/1/4; W. Harrison Moore Papers, University of Melbourne. The poem remains the most widely circulated of the anti-conscription propaganda; see, for example, Bertha Walker, A Story of the 1916 and 1917 Campaigns in Victoria (Northcote: Anti Conscription Jubilee Committee, 1968), back cover.

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T he Conscription Conflict and the Great War between our own and other mothers’ sons. It will not be mothers who defeat it.

It was not only mothers who needed to take action. Women who had no sons to send also had a responsibility to vote Yes. To these women Harrison and Webb said that it was their responsibility to ‘serve your country with your judgment – to help the fighting men – to safeguard freedom for the children. And this freedom was only possible by voting Yes’. Freedoms were at peril. Women, who had been given equal and full citizen rights as men were obliged to take notice, for their country was in danger. Under German rule, women would not be free, and the ‘freedom of the children, and of the children yet to be – yours or the next woman’s – is in danger’.38 In this pamphlet conscription was necessary in order to uphold the continued rights of liberal values of freedom, individual rights and responsibilities. The introduction of conscription did not contradict these values; it upheld them. How long should conscription last? The Universal Service League, of which Moore was a member, insisted that conscription would only be in place until the end of the war. It was a ‘suspension not a surrender of full personal independence’. The term ‘conscription’, the League argued, meant no more than ‘enrolment’. The decision to impose conscription would be taken only where there was agreement by all − not introduced by a ‘single despot or a despotic caste’. The compliance to the state would be no more onerous than playing for a sporting team under the direction of the captain: But really there is no more loss of liberty for the citizens under such regulation in war-time, than there is in the obedience of a football team to their captain. It is only while the game lasts, and they have chosen their captain themselves. 39

Moore had been a staunch advocate of the need for conscription well before the announcement of a plebiscite. In May 1916 he had joined other supporters of conscription at a meeting in St. Kilda Town Hall called to generate a petition for it to go to the people. He argued that ‘there was such an overwhelming weight of opinion in favor of conscription that the Federal Government would, in spite of its present attitude, fall into line with public opinion’. Moore and his supporters strongly believed that if a referendum 38 39

Our Cause, W. Harrison Moore Papers, University of Melbourne Archives. Universal Service League, The Case for Universal Service (Sydney: William Brooks and Co, nd),13, 15, 16.

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were put it would be endorsed.40 In St. Kilda, where Moore lived, he pushed for a petition and one was circulated.41 His enthusiasm reflected his view that this was already a settled matter. The Australian Worker noted, with approval, that Moore and his supporters were not opposed to the anti-conscriptionists putting their view. By contrast, some local councils refused to hire their halls to those who wanted to argue the No case.42 Violence erupted at meetings sponsored by the Yes case; but it was also perpetrated by supporters of the Yes case.43 Once the 1916 referendum was defeated, Moore redoubled his efforts. A self-styled ‘Group of University trained men and women academics’, led by Moore and Webb, promoted their arguments in favour of conscription tirelessly. Colleagues such as Richard Berry, Professor of Anatomy, and Harold Woodruff, a veterinary pathologist and bacteriologist who had served in the AIF in Egypt and France, addressed meetings at factories, in the suburbs and in country centres. Members of the Group that also included the philosopher Professor William Boyce Gibson, the professor of physiology Professor William Osborne, and the professor of Engineering Henry Payne, published some fifty articles in the country press. Members also wrote a series of advertisements for the press and distributed a vast number of leaflets, including 10,000 copies of Our Cause. Some 6,000 copies of six other leaflets were also were prepared and distributed in city and country areas. To help distribute leaflets the Group also enlisted the assistance of others, such as Professor Thomas Laby, Professor of Natural Philosophy who ‘devoted a considerable amount of time to the Referendum campaign’.44 On the back of each of the leaflets was a cartoon by the Dutch artist Louis Raemaekers, whose vehemently anti-German cartoons had appeared in the British press from 1915 and had become a feature in the Daily Mail.45 Edith Harrison Moore was as active as her husband and their university circle. She spoke as a member of the NCW − the NCW believed conscription 40 41 42 43 44 45

Malvern Standard, 6 May 1916, 6. Argus, 3 May 1916, 10. Australian Worker, 20 December 1917, 16. See Joy Damousi, ‘Socialist Women and Gendered Space: Anti-conscription and Anti-war Campaigns 1914–1918’, Labour History no. 60 (1991): 1–15. ‘Report done of work done in connection with Second referendum’, 14/3/18. W. Harrison Moore Papers, University of Melbourne Archives. See Ariane De Rantiz, Louis Raemaekers, ‘armed with pen an pencil’: How a Dutch cartoonist became world famous during the First World War (Netherlands, Lois Raemaekers Foundation, 2014).

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to be ‘just and democratic’46 − and her campaigning took her to country Victoria. The Rutherglen Sun reported in March 1917 that Edith had made an ‘appeal to the mothers and sisters of men … for them not to keep the men back’.47 Edith ‘deprecated any attempt to descend into abuse against those who held opposite views, believing that it would only weaken their case’. Other women in the NCW could not see why conscription had become such an issue. Mrs. J. McInerny, its vice-president, said that ‘personally she could not understand why there should be any fuss about conscription’; to ‘oppose the sending of men to aid the mother country was a dreadful thing’.48 With the exception of the Women’s Peace Army and Women’s Political Association, conscription was supported by most women’s organisations during the war. The Australian Women’s National League tolerated no opposing views. As Judith Smart has shown, women from the League insisted that women should be proud to have their sons volunteer for active service. The League was at the forefront of organising campaigns for enlistment, and was among the first to organise large public meetings.49 The League’s Mrs. Matthews firmly stated that men at the front believed they should have reinforcements. Andrew Fisher, Hughes’ predecessor, had declared that Australia would defend Britain ‘to our last man and our last shilling;50 but it wasn’t doing this. Her own son, Matthews revealed, had ‘gone back to the front a cripple, but he had gone back to fight (Applause)’. Australia’s freedoms would be lost, she believed, if it was defeated; the prize Germany would demand would be Australia.51 Women clashed publically and violently over the question of conscription. At rallies and other events both sides reacted violently as women who had lost their sons responded angrily and bitterly.52 Moral complexity and emotional intensity coalesced around grief that drove violent behaviour. Each side was convinced that they were morally correct. 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

Argus, 24 November 1917, 19; see also Smart, ‘Women Waging War’. Rutherglen Sun, 16 March 1917, 2. Argus, 24 November 1917, 19. Judith Smart, ‘A Divided National Capital: Melbourne in the Great War’, The LaTrobe Journal, no.96, (2015): 46. Peter Bastian, Andrew Fisher: An Underestimated Man (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2009), 3–4. Argus, 24 November 1917, 19. See Raymond Evans, ‘“All the Passion of the Womanhood”: Margaret Thorp and the Battle of the Brisbane School of Arts’, in Gender and War: Australians at War in the Twentieth Century, eds. Joy Damousi and Marilyn Lake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 239–253.

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Voters in Melbourne, the national capital until 1927, seemed likely in 1917 to support the Yes case. Prime Minister Hughes addressed a crowd of 100,000 supporters at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. ‘The great mass of the audience’, reported the Melbourne magazine Table Talk, ‘in no unmeasured terms, made known its firm resolution to do its duty on December 20th, and perform that task which sneering critics have proclaimed “Impossible”, namely, to prove that a community of British stock will not hesitate in the hour of trial to conscript themselves’.53 The Yes case also drew on the leading figure of Victorian liberalism – Alfred Deakin, now retired. ‘Fellow Countrymen’, he wrote, ‘I have lived and worked to help you keep Australia white and free. The supreme choice is given you on 20 December. On that day you can say the word that shall keep her name white and for ever free … My countrymen, be true to yourselves, to Australia, and to our great Empire. Let our voices thunder “Yes” and future generations shall arise and call us blessed’.54 Too few Victorians were swayed by these arguments. Having voted Yes in the first referendum, Victoria voted No in the second.

Alexander Leeper and Conscription Not all conscriptionists tolerated dissent. For Leeper, notions of liberty and freedom were not matters to be debated and discussed. Instead, they required brutal action. In the university Council, Leeper campaigned for the dismissal of two German members of staff; after 1915, he prevented their reappointment. By this time Australians of German background had become the subject of hostility, even abuse. Many lost their jobs, and there were calls for their internment or deportation. The University considered removing ‘aliens’ from the graduates’ roll. On whether the University should bar the children of aliens from receiving scholarships, Moore and Leeper disagreed; Moore believed that it should not bar them and that it should not remove German names from the graduates’ roll. The Council sided with Moore. Towards staff, however, attitudes were different. Eduard Scharf, a distin­ guished pianist, had been on a yearly contract since 1913, which was up for renewal in 1914, and he was not naturalised. Moore was consulted, could see no objection to a renewal, and Scharf was reappointed. Leeper, however, pursued him and Walter von Dechend – spreading rumours about the latter’s 53 54

Table Talk, 13 December 1917, 4. Quoted in Inglis, ‘Conscription in Peace and War, 1911–1945’, 43.

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role in the German army and his disloyalty. To the Council, Leeper argued that by employing them, the University gave the impression that it was not promoting the interests of Empire. Leeper moved to have them dismissed. Others, including the Professor of Chemistry, David Masson resisted, claiming that Leeper’s desire to impoverish two well respected colleagues and citizens who had been in Australia a long time was ‘pure hysteria and playing to the gallery’. However, the Council agreed that unnaturalised citizens could not be reappointed; while some were opposed to this action, there was a strong perception outside the University that it had not been sufficiently careful in purging its staff. When Scharf ’s appointment was raised again, the Council agreed that he should not be reappointed. Students protested; they were critical of a Council they believed had worked itself into a state of suspicion and mistrust. No longer part of the University, Scharf was vulnerable. In 1918 he was interned as a prisoner of war at Langwarrin and later sent to a camp in New South Wales. In 1919 he was deported.55 These were testing times for the University’s tolerance and pronouncement of liberal freedoms, on which the very notion of a University was founded. The war shifted the views of those like Leeper who prior to the war held progressive views on such matters of women’s entry into universities and admitting women into residential colleges.56 The war also shaped the type of liberal internationalism Moore and Webb embraced during the war and after it.

Post-conscription We can explore this aspect of their liberalism by also considering the involvement of John Latham, the future High Court judge, through whom Webb and Moore became involved in peace work through the League of Nations Union. Latham graduated from the University in 1896 with a BA, and returned in 1899 to complete his law degree. He became secretary of the Victorian branch of the Universal Service League, when it was formed in 1915, and he and his wife Ella campaigned for the introduction of conscription.57 Ella was a longtime friend and companion of Webb – as a fellow graduate in 1902 and co-editor of a literary anthology.58 Latham

55 Selleck, The Shop, 530–34. 56 Poynter, Doubts and Certainties, 386–89. 57 Universal Service League, The Case for Universal Service. 58 Janson, ‘Jessie Webb and the Predicament of the Female Historian’, 91–110.

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lectured at the University in logic and later in law.59 In October 1916 at a meeting of students chaired by the president of the Student’s Representation Council, Robert Menzies, Latham spoke on the need for conscription.60 In 1921, with Fredrick Eggleston, Latham formed the Victorian branch of the League of Nations Union. This organisation adopted the values of the League of Nations, formed a year earlier. The League aimed to uphold peace and security, international law and encourage open and honorable relations based on mutual understanding and good will. It stood for world peace and advocated that disputes be settled through arbitration, negotiation and disarmament.61 While both Moore and Webb had international interests and con­ nec­tions prior to 1914, the war provided a new political framework for their thinking. In 1922 Webb’s tour to Greece was cut short when Prime Minister Bruce asked her to join the Australian delegation to the League of Nations Assembly in Geneva.62 The International Woman Suffrage Alliance commended Bruce. The Victorian branch of the NCW also welcomed her appointment: ‘We feel that she understands European problems from the point of view of those who are most affected by the solution of them – she has an international mind’.63 Later, the Lyceum Club in Melbourne, urged Bruce to appoint her a delegate: she possessed a ‘clear and judicial mind’ and ‘would be an in ideal representative of Australian women’.64 Webb found a new platform where she could exercise that mind engaging with the world’s problems, especially those related to displaced women and children. In July 1924, she asked Australian women to promote the work of Karen Jeppe, appointed by the United Nations to assist the women and children who had been victims of the Armenian genocide.65 Moore, too, served as a delegate at the League of Nations Assembly from 1928 to 1930. There he played a role in revising the rules of the international 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

Stuart Macintyre, ‘Latham, Sir John Greig (1877–1964)’, in Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol 10: 1891–1939, Nairn and Serle, eds., 2–6. Argus, 20 October 1916, 8. Stuart Macintyre, A History for a Nation: Ernest Scott and the Making of Australian His­tory (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1994), 125. See also F.S. Northedge, The League of Nations: Its Life and Times, 1920–1946 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1986). Hugh Gilchrist, Australians and Greeks, Volume 2 (Sydney: Halstead Press, 1997),191. Edith Burrett to the Prime Minister, 19 May 29t1923, Series A981/1, Item: League of Nations 4th Assembly 1, National Archives of Australia (NAA). Emily Scott to the Prime Minister, 6 June 1923, Series A981/1. Item: League of Nations 4th Assembly 1, NAA. News (Adelaide), 19 July 1924, 1

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T he Conscription Conflict and the Great War

court of Justice. 66 The postwar world showed how imperial loyalty and nationalism could co-exist; both, he argued, served Australia well.67 One of the aims of the Australian League of Nations Union, in 1930, was to ‘promote the formation in Australia of an instructed public opinion on international relations, and in particular on those relations affecting Australia’.68 After the devastation of the war, these liberal intellectuals sought solace in the hope offered by the League.

Conclusion In his history of the University, Ernest Scott noted how the war had ‘cut short some careers which seemed certain to lead to distinction’. It was a great waste of lives, he believed, ‘not fully realised’.69 Despite Leeper’s complaints, by the war’s end over 1700 University of Melbourne graduates, students and staff members had enlisted. Some 251 had died. For Webb and Moore these deaths were not in vain; their lives had been sacrificed for Australian freedoms and for peace. During the conscription debates Webb had argued that it was only with the defeat of Germany that there would be enduring peace, by conscription if necessary. ‘Durable peace’, she wrote in a letter to the Hamilton Spectator, ‘can be attained only by the success of the Allies in arms. Men are necessary therefore vote Yes’.70 The impact of the war on Melbourne academics was enduring. They actively sought to prevent a repeat of the carnage it had generated. From the streets of Melbourne to the world of Geneva, they cast aside the shadow of war through a shared optimism for what could be achieved through the League of Nations. This optimism filled their generation with hope for a peaceful future, as once again they joined in a collective endeavour. But not even defeat in the conscription referendum could prepare them for another violent and abrupt end to peace, once again, and all too soon after 1918.

66 Re, ‘Moore, Sir William Harrison (1867–1935)’. 67 Cotton, The Australian School of International Relations, 28 68 ‘Australian League of Nations Union Constitution, June 1930’; W. Harrison Moore Papers, University of Melbourne. 69 Ernest Scott, A History of the University (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1936) 194. 70 Hamilton Spectator, 6 December 1917, 3.

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Image 1: “Welcome Home to the Cause of Anti-Conscription”, Australian Worker, August 1916. University of Melbourne Archive.

Image 2: “The Anti’s Creed.” Reinforcements Referendum Council. 1917. Riley and Ephemera Collection, State Library of Victoria.

Image 3: “Murders!” Reinforcements Referendum Council. Probably 1917. Riley and Ephemera Collection, State Library of Victoria. .

Image 4: “At Berlin If Australia Voted No!” Authorised by Hector Lamond and F.J. Thomas. 1916. World War 1 Recruitment and Patriotic Posters, State Library of New South Wales.

Image 5: “Thumbs Down!”, Bulletin, October 1916. State Library of New South Wales.

Image 6: “The Labor Women’s Anti-Conscription Committee”, Labor Call, November 1916. University of Melbourne Archive.

Image 7: “Women’s Anti-Conscription Demonstration”, Labor Call, November 1916. University of Melbourne Archive.

Image 8: Archbishop Daniel Mannix, circa 1917, © MDHC Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne.

Image 9: Trades Hall, Melbourne, 1917. “In commemoration of the Anti-Conscription Campaign”, University of Melbourne Archives, 1988.0062.0014.

Image 10: “Melbourne Answers ‘No’ To Mr. Hughes”. 1916. Sam Merrifield Collection, State Library of Victoria.

Image 11: “Vote No Mum”. Australian Labor Party. 1916. Sam Merrifield Collection, State Library of Victoria.

Image 12: “The Blood Vote”. W.R. Winspear and Claude Marquet. 1916. Riley and Ephemera Collection, State Library of Victoria.

Image 13: “Club That Bug Early”, Australian Worker, January 1916. University of Melbourne Archive.

Image 14: “Hughlysses and the Sirens”, Australian Worker, August 1916. National Library of Australia.

Image 15: “Billy’s Foreign Mash”, Australian Worker, September 1916. University of Melbourne Archive.

Image 16: “Prussianism Defeated”, Labor Call, November 1916. University of Melbourne Archive.

Image 17: “Napoleon Hughes Watching His Sun Set”, Australia Worker, October 1916. University of Melbourne Archive.

Cha pte r Five

T H E R E S U LT S OF T H E 1916 A N D 1917 C ONS CR I P T ION R EF ER E N D U M S R E-E X A M I N E D Murray Goot

On 28 October 1916, voters were asked: ‘Are you in favour of the Govern­ ment having, in this grave emergency, the same compulsory powers over citizens in regard to requiring their military service, for the term of this war, outside the Commonwealth [of Australia], as it now has in regard to military service within the Commonwealth [of Australia].’ When the results were announced, two days later, the proposal had been defeated, the final figures showing that 48.4 per cent had voted ‘Yes’, 51.6 per cent ‘No’. ‘The Australian Army is, of course, wholeheartedly in favour of conscription’, the correspondent for the Round Table wrote in June 1916, ‘and the soldiers may be trusted to bring strong influence to bear upon their friends and relatives’.1 However, the troops who had voted on 18 October – a date fixed by Hughes in the hope that they would lead by example – were less than wholehearted: 72,399 favoured the proposal, but 58,894 were against.2 Even so, there were those who suspected the ‘No’ vote had been understated.3 Had the margin in favour among servicemen and women been 72,477 instead of 13,505 the results would have been publicised; more importantly, the vote would have 1 ‘Australia’, Round Table, 6 no. 24 (1916): 749–50. 2 Sue Langford, ‘Conscription’, in Australian Defence: Sources and Statistics: The Australian Centenary History of Defence, Volume VI, eds, Joan Beaumont et al. (South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2001), 386–87. 3 K.S. Inglis, ‘Conscription in Peace and War, 1911–1945’, in Conscription in Australia, eds. Roy Forward and Bob Reece (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1968), 64n56.

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T he Conscription Conflict and the Great War

been carried, the ‘No’ majority being just 72,476.4 Instead, the results were suppressed.5 In the second referendum, conducted on 20 December 1917, voters were asked: ‘Are you in favour of the proposal of the Commonwealth Government for reinforcing the Australian Forces overseas?’ This was lost 46.2: 53.8, the results being released this time without the previous delay. Those serving overseas – again, considered ‘vital’ if the referendum were to pass6 − divided 103,789 to 93,910 according to the official count, a majority that had con­ tracted from 55.1 to 52.5 per cent.7 It was ‘the men on transports and in camp, rather than those actually at the front’, Charles Bean reported, ‘who were responsible for the excess of the “Yes” vote’ among the troops.8 If there was ‘good reason to suspect that the 1916 result was tampered with’ there was ‘a possibility’ that in 1917 it had happened again.9 Some aspects of the results nationwide are widely agreed, if not always soundly based: that support for the ‘No’ case built during the campaign; that in 1916 the vote in New South Wales was crucial; that the best way of predicting the vote, electorate by electorate, was in terms of whether the Labor Party, the Liberal Party (1916) or the Nationalist Party (1917) held the seat; that voters recently arrived from Britain were especially likely to vote ‘Yes’; that those of German origin were overwhelmingly likely to vote ‘No’. Other aspects of the vote – and not just the division among the troops − remain matters of dispute: the solidarity of the Labor vote, especially in States where the labour movement was weak or the Labor Party disunited; the division of the women’s vote – hence, also, the men’s vote; whether voters 4

5 6 7 8 9

Since this was not a referendum to amend the Constitution it required the support of the majority to pass but not the majority in the majority of States. While acknow­ ledging that ‘Hughes didn’t need a referendum to introduce conscription’, Carlyon somehow imagines that it still required a double majority; Les Carlyon, The Great War (Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 2014/2006), 254, 263. L.L. Robson, The First A.I.F.: A Study of its Recruitment 1914–1918 (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1970), 118–19. John Connor, Anzac and Empire: George Foster Pearce and the Foundations of Australian Defence (Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 108. Ernest Scott, Australia during the War: The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, Volume XI (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1936), 352, 427–28. Cited in Inglis, ‘Conscription in Peace and War, 1911–1945’, 40. Jeffrey Grey, The Australian Army: The Australian Centenary History of Defence, Volume 1 (South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2001), 48. According to Hughes’ private papers, ‘Members of Forces outside Australia’ voted 82,655 ‘Yes’, 81,940 ‘No’; Robert Bollard, In the Shadow of Gallipoli: The Hidden History of Australia in World War I (Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2013), 147. This would have made the Forces vote much closer and also 33,302 higher than the official count.

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Chapter Five

in the country were crucial to the referendums’ defeat; the influence of Dr Mannix not only on the Catholic vote but also on the vote of Protestants; and the impact of the propaganda from both sides of the debate, of state censorship, and of the public’s weariness of war. In this chapter I review most of the arguments and a wide range of the evidence about who voted and how they voted. I start with crucial but neglected questions about how many men and women voted on each occasion, the electorates in which they voted, and how their turnout differed from their turnout at each of the 1914 and 1917 elections. I re-examine the patterns of support for, and opposition to, conscription across the States, in the cities and the country, and in Labor and non-Labor seats. And I link arguments about the failure of the referendums with arguments about the failure of constitutional referendums. In doing so, I re-examine old answers, pose new questions, and suggest future avenues of research.

Turnout In the new Commonwealth of Australia, the interest mobilised by the ref­ erendums had no precedent. With 82.8 per cent of the electorate voting in 1916 and 81.3 per cent in 1917, the turnouts were greater than at any national referendum held before the introduction of compulsory voting (more accurately, compulsory turnout) in 1924.10 In 1916, some combination of a sense that the stakes were high, that there was a duty to vote, and that turning out might help determine an otherwise uncertain outcome, is difficult to deny. ‘For the first time’, Lloyd Robson observed, ‘the hotels were closed on a polling day and the federal authorities had forbidden the posting of progress returns’.11 It may be true that the outcome of the second referendum was more certain; that holding the second referendum on a Thursday rather than a Saturday was designed to make it more difficult for 10

11

A number of sources date compulsory voting from 1915; see, for example, R.S. Parker, ‘The People and the Constitution’, in Geoffrey Sawer et al., Federalism in Australia (Melbourne: F.W. Cheshire, 1949), 157. This is mis­taken. In 1915, the Commonwealth introduced compulsory voting at referendums for all electors ‘residing within five miles of a polling place’ (s4,) but only at referendums sub­mit­ted during 1915 (s3). Hughes had promised to introduce a referendum on prices but didn’t go ahead; George Williams and David Hume, People Power: The History and Future of the Referendum in Australia (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2010), 49. I am grateful to David Hume for drawing my attention to the Compulsory Voting Act 1915 (Cth). The hotels were to be closed for the second referendum as well; Robson, The First A.I.F., 115, 178–79.

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T he Conscription Conflict and the Great War

anti-conscriptionists to register a vote; and that war-weariness was taking its toll.12 But if any of these affected turnout the effect wasn’t particularly marked. The wartime elections also generated higher turnouts than earlier elections. In 1914, 73.5 per cent turned out; in 1917, a few months before the second referendum, 78.3 per cent did so. Neither election, however, generated as high a turnout as the two referendums. In every State, except South Australia, turnout was higher at each of the conscription referendums than it had been at earlier referendums (see Table 1).

Electorates Turnout by electorate varied more than turnout by State. In the first refer­ endum turnout ranged from 88.9 per cent in Oxley, a marginal Labor seat in Bris­bane, to 69.8 per cent in Barrier, a safe Labor seat in rural New South Wales. In the second referendum it ranged from 82.5 per cent in Herbert, a marginal Liberal seat in rural Queensland, to 61.1 per cent in Angas, a mar­ ginal Liberal seat in rural South Australia with ‘a large number’ of ‘GermanAustralian voters’ who had been now disfranchised.13 Whether the seats were ‘safe’ or ‘marginal’ doesn’t seem to have had much effect on turnout.14 At the 1916 referendum, turnout was only slightly lower in safe Labor seats than in safe non-Labor seats: in Labor’s safe seats turnout was 81.9 per cent, while in the safe seats held by Liberals it was 83.6 per cent. The average turnout (83.0 per cent) in the marginal seats was similar. For 1917, the story is much the same. If the choice of Thursday for the 1917 ballot instead of Saturday was meant to affect turnout in heavily unionised seats the data suggest that it failed; turnout was slightly higher in ‘safe’ Labor seats (74.9 per cent), which presumably included those heavily unionised, than in ‘safe’ Nationalist seats (73.6 per cent), though in 1917 the votes of service personnel were counted only in the State totals. The evidence that a Thursday poll − ‘a special inconvenience for rural voters’ who usually went to town on a Saturday − or the closing of the rolls two days after the referendum was an­nounced, designed to disenfranchise those with ‘nomadic occupations’,15 12

Shaw wondered whether ‘some feeling of war weariness’ helped explain the 1916 vote; A.G.L. Shaw, The Story of Australia (London: Faber and Faber, second edition, 1962/1955), 225. 13 Leslie C. Jauncey, The Story of Conscription in Australia (South Melbourne: Macmillan, 1968/1935), 232. 14 Uncontested seats are also regarded as ‘safe’, defined here as seats secured by the winning candidate with at least 60 per cent of the formal vote at the previous election. Seats not classified as ‘safe’ are regarded as ‘marginal’. 15 Robson, The First A.I.F., 171; Jauncey, The Story of Conscription in Australia, 272–73.

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Chapter Five

disproportionately affected turnout in rural areas is more equivocal. The turnout in rural electorates was 10 percentage points lower in 1917 than in 1916, while in metropolitan seats it was 8.1 percentage points lower. Table 1: Turnout by gender before compulsory voting, Commonwealth referendums by State, 1906–1919* (percentages)

NSW

Vic

Qld

SA

WA

Tas

National

1906

1910

1911

1913

1916‡

1917‡

1919

Men

58.6 [+15.3]

67.8 [+13.6]

50.7 [+13.7]

73.1 [+8.2]

85.9 [+8.6]

87.6 [+13.8]

72.8 [+12.9]

Women

43.8

54.2

37.0

64.9

76.5

73.8

59.9

Total

51.7

61.4

44.3

69.3

81.3

80.8

66.5

Men

62.3 [+11.2]

71.0 [+8.7]

66.5 [+8.8]

80.1 [+9.1]

88.7 [+8.3]

90.8 [+12.8]

80.1 [+7.5]

Women

51.1

62.3

57.7

71.0

80.4

78.0

72.6

Total

56.7

66.6

62.0

75.5

84.5

84.1

76.2

Men

53.0 [+15.9]

66.0 [+10.2]

60.4 [+11.8]

79.0 [+4.1]

86.9 [+4.9]

86.8 [+10.4]

84.3 [-1.2]

Women

37.1

55.8

48.6

74.9

82.0

76.4

85.5

Total

45.9

61.2

55.3

77.3

84.7

82.0

84.9

Men

44.4 [+16.0]

60.2 [+14.2]

66.0 [+8.3]

83.5 [+6.9]

86.2 [+11.6]

82.9 [+14.3]

73.4 [+13.8]

Women

28.4

46.0

57.7

76.6

74.6

68.6

59.6

Total

36.5

53.2

61.9

80.1

80.4

75.7

66.4

Men

40.7 [+12.0]

66.3 [+11.4]

50.8 [+16.4]

75.3 [+4.4]

86.9 [+6.8]

92.3 [+19.2]

69.1 [+12.9]

Women

28.7

55.9

34.4

70.9

80.1

73.1

56.2

Total

36.2

62.2

44.3

73.5

83.9

83.5

63.1

Men

61.6 [+15.8]

64.8 [+13.3]

61.3 [+9.7]

79.4 [+8.4]

85.9 [+8.3]

82.9 [+18.2]

65.0 [+12.7]

Women

45.8

51.5

51.6

71.0

77.6

64.7

52.3

Total

54.1

58.5

56.7

75.3

81.8

73.8

58.7

Men

56.4 [+13.2]

67.6 [+11.4]

58.4 [+10.7]

77.2 [+7.5]

86.8 [+8.3]

88.1 [+13.6]

76.0 [+9.4]

Women

43.2

56.2

47.7

69.7

78.5

74.5

66.6

Total

50.2

62.2

53.3

73.7

82.8

81.3

71.3

* Figures in square brackets are the differences (in percentage points) between the proportion of men turning out and the proportion of women ‡ Non-constitutional referendums

Source: Australian Electoral Commission, Australian Referendums 1906–1999, CD-ROM

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T he Conscription Conflict and the Great War

‘In 1917’, Ian Turner wrote, ‘turnout tended to fall less than … the average in Labor seats, and vice versa in Liberal seats’. In 1916 service personnel were included in the seat by seat totals; but in 1917, as we have noted, they were counted separately and added only to the State totals. Though the number of service personnel was large – 199,677 ‘Members of Forces and Crews of Transports’ cast their votes in 1917, the vote having been extended to all members of the AIF regardless of age16 – their distribution across the States (a low of 8.2 per cent in Victoria to a high of 9.1 per cent in South Australia) was reasonably even; only in Western Australia (14.4 per cent) was the proportion substantially higher.17 We can compare the turnout of electors across Labor and non-Labor electorates in 1917 with that of 1916 provided we assume that turnout rates among service personnel were roughly the same as the turnout rates among non-service personnel in the same electorates. Granted this caveat, Turner’s observation appears to be borne out by the figures. Whether this meant, as Turner assumed,18 that it was Liberal (Nationalist) rather than Labor voters who were less likely to turnout is a separate question. Turner was not alone in conflating the two.

Gender Among men, the turnout (86.8 per cent in 1916, rising to 88.1 per cent in 1917) was higher than at earlier referendums (see Table 1). In 1916, across the States, turnout among men was uniformly high, the lowest being in New South Wales (85.9 per cent) and the highest in Victoria (88.7 per cent). In 1917, the spread was greater: lowest (82.9 per cent) in South Australia and Tasmania where it was down by around three percentage points, highest (92.3 per cent) in Western Australia where it rose by over five percentage points. Among women, too, the turnout in 1916 was greater than at any previous referendum. ‘Conscription’, Vida Goldstein’s biographer would write, ‘had roused women politically like nothing else since their enfranchisement’.19 In 1917, however, turnout among women declined from 78.5 per cent to 74.5 per cent; the decline ranged from 2.4 percentage points in Victoria 16 17 18 19

Bobbie Oliver, War and Peace in Western Australia: The Social and Political Impact of the Great War, 1914–1926 (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1995), 116. Australian Electoral Commission, Australian Referendums 1906–1999, CD-ROM; author’s calculations. For State figures and recruitment in South Australia, notionally by electorate, see Robson, The First A.I.F., 136–37. Ian Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics: The Labour Movement in Eastern Australia, 1900–1921 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1965), 165. Janette M. Bomford, That Dangerous and Persuasive Woman: Vida Goldstein (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1993), 173.

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Chapter Five

and 2.7 percentage points in New South Wales, to 5.6 percentage points in Queensland, 6.0 percentage points in South Australia, and 7.0 percentage points in Western Australia, to 12.9 percentage points in Tasmania. Greater participation by men than women in referendums was not new. There are a number of possible explanations. One is that more women than men saw politics if not as a man’s game then as something of little or no interest to them, organised around issues on which they either had no opin­ ion or opinions they thought unlikely to matter. On this view, even men who wanted women to vote – because they hoped, for example, that their wives or daughters might vote the same way as they were voting – had difficulty persuading women to vote. Another possibility is that men actively discouraged their wives or daughters from voting. A third possibility is that men simply found it easier to vote. Shifts in the size of this gender gap, especially increases from the first referendum to the second, are more puzzling. In 1916, the gap was smaller than at previous referendums. In 1917, however, it was as high as it had ever been: men’s participation increased while women’s participation declined. Jill Roe has noted that in South Australia the gap increased ‘dramatically’; but the increase (2.7 percentage points) was smaller than in most other States.20 Were women staying away as a protest against the increased coarseness of the campaigning; because they were disillusioned that the matter had not been settled the first time; or because they were more inclined to calculate that the outcome wouldn’t depend on their vote? The fact that the decrease in women’s turnout was relatively small in the largest States – those in which the outcome would most likely be determined – and largest in the smaller States, a fortiori Tasmania – offers one of the few direct clues.

Voting Patterns The States Of the voting itself, almost every analysis starts with the overall figures and the State by State outcomes. Sometimes that is where the analysis finishes as well. It was not the ‘evenness of the total vote’ in 1916 that caught Frank Crowley’s eye; what was ‘extraordinary’ was ‘the unevenness of the state votes’.21 The proposal was endorsed in three States, most widely in Western 20 21

Jill Roe, ‘Chivalry and Social Policy in the Antipodes’, Historical Studies 22 no. 88 (1987): 407. F.K. Crowley, Modern Australia in Documents, Vol 1, 1901–1939 (Melbourne: Wren, 1973), 267.

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T he Conscription Conflict and the Great War

Australia, but rejected in New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia. ‘The distribution’, said the correspondent for the Round Table, was curious and unexpected. The ‘Yes’ majority was not anticipated in Vic­ toria, and the majority in Western Australia is surprisingly great. In South Australia the conscriptionists hoped for an easy victory, but were heavily defeated. In New South Wales, while forecasts of the results differed, no one foresaw that the cause of conscription would suffer such a crushing overthrow. The majority in Queensland is smaller than expected.22

In the ‘Reinforcements Referendum’ the absolute size of the ‘Yes’ vote was smaller. Western Australia and Tasmania again voted ‘Yes’. New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia and now Victoria voted ‘No’ (the number of ‘Antis’ in Victoria increasing only slightly), the size of the ‘No’ vote growing in every State except South Australia where it declined sharply (Table 2). At national elections, Andrew Leigh estimates, when ‘the temperature is 10° Celsius hotter than usual for that state, the incumbent party sees a 1.8 percentage point fall in its vote’.23 If we assume that national elections and national referendums are analogous, and that the referendum was seen as a government proposal to which the Opposition was opposed, it follows that had the mercury in Melbourne not soared to 37.3°C − 14.1°C above the longterm (1887–1917) average for 20 December – Victoria, which voted ‘No’ by just 2,718 votes in 1917, might well have voted ‘Yes’. If the temperature in Tasmania had been slightly warmer – in Hobart it was 23.8°C, 3.3°C above its long-term average – Tasmanians, who voted ‘Yes’ by a margin of 379 votes in 1917, might have voted ‘No’. Analyses of the results based on political, economic or social differences between States typically assume that whatever is correlated with these differ­ ences is also the cause of these differences. Neither in 1916 when New South Wales and Victoria had Labor governments, nor in 1917 when Labor held office in New South Wales and Queensland did the political complexion of the State government seem to matter. Instead, Frederick Watson argued, in one of the first analyses of this kind, ‘money interests’ – crucially, in New South Wales − carried the day. He based this on a rank-ordering of the States that showed wealth per capita ‘exactly correspond[ing] with the order in which 22 ‘Australia’, Round Table, 7 no. 26 (1917): 386. 23 Andrew Leigh, The Luck of Politics: True Tales of Disaster and Outrageous Fortune (Collingwood: Black Inc., 2015), 74. I am grateful to the author for sharing his data. In 1917 (unlike 1916) it was clear that the referendum was backed by the Nationalist government and opposed by the Labor opposition.

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Chapter Five

States voted in 1916 and 1917’ (except that in 1917 South Australia sank to third position) with the ‘three wealthiest states’ (South Australia, New South Wales, and Queensland) receiving ‘the largest share in war profits on per capita bases’ and voting ‘No’.24 Watson’s analysis gained no purchase in the published literature; but other, more plausible analyses of State differences did.

Western Australia and the British In Western Australia the size of the ‘Yes’ vote was widely remarked and attributed almost as widely to the number of voters recently settled from Britain. In an influential work, John Robertson noted that the proportion of Western Australians born in Europe (21.5 per cent in the 1911 Census), ‘by far the greater proportion of these coming from the British Isles’, was higher than the national average (15.1 per cent). But since the proportion of Queenslanders born in Europe (23.4 per cent) was even higher, he conceded, and Queensland had voted ‘No’, the proportion of European migrants could not explain the size of the ‘Yes’ vote in Western Australia. What might have explained the vote in Western Australia was not the proportion of Britons, he argued, but the proportion of people born in England that had lived in Australia for less than twenty years and therefore not ‘acclimatised in the tradition of the “Independent Australian Britons”’. In Western Australia the proportion of these people was three times greater than in the rest of Australia. It was this ratio that ‘may help to explain the State’s variation from the Australia-wide vote at the two conscription referendums’.25 However, if the numbers that had emigrated from England are any guide (the numbers from Northern Ireland being impossible to distinguish from the numbers from what would become the Irish Republic) those coming from ‘the British Isles’ did not constitute ‘by far the greater proportion’ of these arriving from Europe. The proportion of Australians in 1911 born in England (7.9 per cent in 1911; 8.2 per cent in 1921) was much lower than the proportion born in Europe. And while it is true that the numbers were disproportionately high in both Western Australia (11.8 per cent and 14.8 per cent, in 1911 and 1921) and Queensland (10.9 per cent and 10.0 per 24

25

Frederick Watson, A Brief Analysis of Public Opinion in Australia during the Past Six Years (Sydney: Tyrrell’s, 1918), 9, 15–18. See also T.A. Metherell, ‘The Conscription Referenda, October 1916 and December 1917: An Inward Turned Nation at War’ (PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 1971), 559, who argues that differences between the States voting ‘Yes’ and those voting ‘No’ are best explained by ‘the degree of prewar social consensus and economic community’. J.R. Robertson, ‘The Conscription Issue and the National Movement, Western Australia: June, 1916 to December, 1917’, University Studies in Western Australian History III no. 3 (1959): 44–45.

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T he Conscription Conflict and the Great War

cent), the proportions were less than half as great as Robertson imagined.26 A difference of 5.6 percentage points between the proportion of Europeans in Western Australia and the proportion in Australia as a whole couldn’t account for the ‘Yes’ vote in Western Australia being 19.6 percentage points higher than in Australia as a whole. Perhaps the West’s political culture holds the answer. Noting that ‘the percentage of Australian-born whose birthplace was outside [Western Australia] was by far the highest in the Commonwealth’, and that those from other States could be expected to have brought with them ‘the attitudes and ideas of the eastern colonies’, the ‘Yes’ vote in Western Australia, Robertson concluded, could only be understood by assuming ‘that physical separation from the large centres of population had caused some change in the attitudes of “t’othersiders”’. The fact that the vote of service personnel from Western Australia in favour of conscription (56.8 per cent) was ‘well below’ the vote of the civilian population in Western Australia (69.7 per cent) is consistent with this conclusion; the association with service personnel from other parts of Australia, he argued, rubbed off on those from the West.27 Considerations of ‘geographical location and physical proximity’ are easily extended. Robertson pointed to (English-born) farmers and miners in Western Australia voting for conscription while their counterparts in the eastern States voted against it. Others have noted the lack of a railway linking the West to the East until after the first referendum, the slowness with which news travelled from the East, and the labour movement’s isolation from the contention evident in the East.28 According to Geoffrey Bolton, ‘the war may have fostered among many Western Australians’ who found themselves ‘outvoted’ on conscription ‘by the rest of the Commonwealth … a tendency to identify more closely with the Mother Country than with the wayward Eastern States’.29 In 1933, Western Australia, the last colony to join the federation, would vote, by a margin of nearly two-to-one, to secede.30 26

27 28 29 30

See James Jupp and Barry York, Birthplaces of the Australian People: Colonial and Commonwealth Censuses, 1828–1991 (Canberra: Centre for Immigration and Multicultural Studies, Australian National University, 1995), 33, 46, and 51 for the 1911 and 1921 Census data. Robertson, ‘The Conscription Issue and the National Movement, Western Australia’: 46–47. A.R. Pearson, ‘Western Australia and the Conscription Plebiscites of 1916 and 1917’, RMC Historical Journal 3 (1974): 24; Oliver, War and Peace in Western Australia, 119–20. Geoffrey Bolton, Land of Vision and Mirage: Western Australia since 1926 (Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2008), 103. Gregory Craven, Secession: The Ultimate States Right (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1986), 34–5, 55–6.

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Table 2: Number of votes cast and the margins in favour of ‘Yes’/’No’ at the 1916 and 1917 referendums, by State 28 October 1916

20 December 1917

No

Total

Informal

Yes-No

Yes

No

Total

Informal

Yes-No

NSW

356,805 (42.9)

474,544 (57.1)

831,349

27,050

-117,739

341,256 (41.2)

487,774 (58.8)

829,030

24,864

-146,518

Vic

353,930 (51.9)

328,216 (48.1)

682,146

14,538

25,724

329,772 (49.8)

332,490 (50.2)

662,262

16,544

-2,718

Qld

144,200 (47.7)

158,051 (52.3)

302,251

7,670

-13,851

132,771 (44.0)

168,875 (56.0)

301,646

8,518

-36,104

SA

87,924 (42.4)

119,236 (57.6)

207,160

4,092

-31,312

86,663 (44.9)

106,364 (55.1)

193,297

4,943

-19,701

WA

94,069 (69.7)

40,884 (30.3)

134,953

5,695

53,185

84,116 (64.4)

46,522 (35.6)

130,638

4,955

37,590

Tas

48,493 (56.2)

37,833 (43.8)

86,326

1,905

10,660

38,881 (50.2)

38,502 (49.8)

77,383

1,409

379

Territories‡

2,136 (62.7)

1,269 (37.3)

3,405

63

867

2,136 (62.7)

1,269 (37.3)

3,405

82

867

Forces*

72,399 (55.1)

58,894 (44.9)

131,293

2,520

13,505

103,789 (52.5)

93,910 (47.5)

197,699

1,978

9,879

Total*

1,087,557 (48.4)

1,160,033 (51.6)

2,247,590 (100.0)

61,013 [2.6]

-72,476

1,015,595 (46.2)

1,181,796 (53.8)

2,197,391 (100.0)

61,351 [2.8]

-166,201

Note: Percentages in brackets

* Forces not included in Total since their votes were counted in the States from which they were drawn

‡ Northern Territory, Territory of Papua, Territory of the Seat of Government, Territory of Norfolk Island

Source: Australian Electoral Commission, Australian Referendums 1906-1999, CD-ROM (Canberra, Commonwealth of Australia, 2000) and Wikipedia for the armed forces

Chapter Five

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T he Conscription Conflict and the Great War

Robertson raised another possibility. ‘In the final analysis’, he said, ‘Western Australia voted for conscription because the State Labour [sic] movement was not united in its opposition to that policy’.31 Since Western Australia was not the only State where the labour movement was not united in its opposition this is unlikely to stand as a ‘final analysis’; the difference between the vote in the West and vote in New South Wales is simply too big for that. More recently, Bobbie Oliver has pointed to other possibilities: ‘a society in which conservative power structures were strongly entrenched and well organized’, in which the ideology of Empire met little challenge, and in which the industrial workforce was not so much organisationally divided as relatively small.32

South Australia and the Germans Where the number of people born in Germany or of German descent was relatively large, ‘there is no doubt’, Turner argued, ‘their votes had a considerable effect on the overall result, especially in South Australian country electorates’.33 Apart from country NSW, the country seats in South Australia were the only rural seats where the ‘No’ vote in 1916 was bigger than the 1914 Labor vote for either the House of Representatives or the Senate. How big was the ‘German’ vote? According to Jenny Stock, in the 20 subdivisions in which they figured most prominently in rural South Australia, there were 14,045 ‘German’ names on the rolls in early 1917; they accounted for 29.7 per cent of those enrolled. With 67 subdivisions in rural electorates and a total enrolment of 137,777, the other subdivisions had an enrolment of about 90,551.34 If we assume that German names in these 47 subdivisions averaged about 5 per cent (Lutherans made-up 6.8 per cent of the population of South Australia in 1911), then we can add another 4,528 or so to that Stock identified. This gives us a total of 18,573 or 13.5 per cent of all those enrolled – a total not too far distant (given the passage of time and the fact that the Census identified men, women and children) from the 26,681 Lutherans identified in the 1911 Census as living in South Australia, about 80 per cent or 21,345 living outside Adelaide. Of these, about 4,000 would have been disenfranchised as ‘enemy aliens’, leaving about 14,573 able 31

Robertson, ‘The Conscription Issue and the National Movement, Western Australia’: 47. 32 Oliver, War and Peace in Western Australia, 106, 125, 128n46. 33 Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics, 115. 34 Jenny Tilby Stock, ‘South Australia’s “German” Vote in World War I’, Australian Journal of Politics and History 28 no. 2 (1982): 255–61.

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to vote.35 If those of German background turned out at roughly the same rate (86.5 per cent) as other voters in these electorates, then roughly 12,600 would have voted and they would have accounted for about 11.6 per cent of the total rural vote (108,950). Had they voted 4:1 against the referendum (and in no electorate was the referendum voted down as comprehensively as that), their net effect on the ‘No’ vote (59.7 per cent in rural electorates) would have been about 2.6 percentage points – the difference in the proportion voting ‘No’ if ‘German’ voters had not voted at all.36 The effect would hardly have been ‘considerable’, as Turner believed; even in these electorates, it could not have been decisive. ‘“German” subdivisions’ may have ‘registered NO percentages in the 60s and 70s’, as Stock reports; but it doesn’t follow that ‘they spearheaded’ a ‘“Liberal defection”’, as she asserts, ‘the two in five country Liberals whose NO votes hold the key to the resounding defeat of conscription in South Australia’.37 The difference between Labor’s Senate vote in South Australia (46.6 per cent) and the ‘No’ vote (57.6 per cent) wouldn’t have required twoin-five of the 1914 Liberals to vote ‘No’; it would have required just over one-in-four. And the defeat of the referendum in South Australia would have required fewer than one-in-eight Liberals to have voted ‘No’, always assuming (as Stock does) that no Labor voters ‘defected’.

Analysing Aggregates In the most influential analysis of voting at the two referendums published in the last fifty years, Glenn Withers attempts to explain variations across non-metropolitan electorates in 1916 and all electorates in 1917 in terms of a series of demographic variables: female voters as a proportion of the formal vote; Roman Catholics as a proportion of the population; the proportion of the population born in Britain; the proportion of the workforce in rural occupations (‘primary producers’); the proportion of the workforce in con­ struction and manufacturing (the ‘industrial class’); males of military age (18–35) as a proportion of the total turnout; and the State in which voters were enrolled. Income was not included, notwithstanding the view that ‘the

35 36

37

P.M. Gibson, ‘The Conscription Issue in South Australia, 1916–1917’, University Studies in Politics and History 4 (1963–64): 74, for the number born in Germany. R.C. Oldham, State of South Australia: Statistical Returns Showing the Voting within each Division in Relation to the Senate Election, 1917 and the General Election for the House of Representatives, 1917 (Melbourne: Commonwealth of Australia, 1917), 8–9, 11, 13; Stock, ‘South Australia’s “German” Vote in World War I’, 255–56. Stock, ‘South Australia’s “German” Vote in World War I’: 258.

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rich and respectable supported conscription while the poor opposed it’. 38 Nor was union density, though this is central to a number of explanations for the referendums’ defeat.39 For neither income nor union membership were there the requisite data. Withers’ data derive from the Census in 1911 and in 1921. They cover the 46 non-metropolitan electorates in 1916 (the data for Sydney and Melbourne could not be mapped by electorate) and all 75 electorates in 1917. According to Withers’ analysis, the ‘basic pattern of voting determinants’ across non-metropolitan electorates ‘did not change significantly between the two referenda’. On both occasions the ‘basic tendency’ or ‘constant’ of his model was a ‘No’ vote. The constant represents variables not specified by the model. One such variable, Withers assumes, is ‘the general Australian tendency to vote “No” in any referendum’.40 Pamphlets distributed during the campaigns were designed to appeal to this disposition.41 The ‘No’ vote was mostly explained by the constant and – to a much lesser extent – by the votes of the industrial class and Catholics, and by the State in which voters resided. In addition, Withers assumes, was a ‘sufficient defection of nonLabor supporters to defeat the referenda’.42 The model suggested a ‘Yes’ vote, at least in 1917, among those born in Britain, primary producers, Western Australians – and women. Though it has carried the day, Withers’ modelling is invalid. The model uses data about groups as if they were data about individuals, a common error known as the ‘ecological fallacy’.43 What the model requires are data about individuals from sample surveys not aggregates from the Census. The one conclusion that might validly be drawn from Withers’ model is about the impact of the States, since States are not simply the sum of their popula­ tions but political entities in their own right. Withers may have expected 38

Russell Ward, The History of Australia: The Twentieth Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 113. 39 See, for example, L.F. Fitzhardinge, The Little Digger 1914–1952: William Morris Hughes, A Political Biography Vol II (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1979), 218. 40 Withers, ‘The 1916–1917 Conscription Referenda’: 40–42. 41 Jauncey, The Story of Conscription in Australia, 218. 42 Withers, ‘The 1916–1917 Conscription Referenda’: 43, 45. In the modelling, Tasmania is the reference State. 43 W.S. Robinson, ‘Ecological Correlations and the Behavior of Individuals’, American Sociological Review 15 no. 3 (1950): 351–57. The problem is solvable but not with the data available in relation to the vote in 1916 or 1917; see Gary King, A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem: Reconstructing Individual Behavior from Aggregate Data (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

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‘traditional historians’ to greet his work with ‘some cynicism’, as some almost certainly did.44 More striking is how many accepted it.45

Labor and Liberal/Nationalist Voters When the Prime Minister brought on the 1916 referendum he expected to win.46 If he expected to win he might have expected that the Liberals would have supported him and that Labor would divide, a sufficient number voting ‘Yes’ to get the referendum across the line. Indeed, ‘he assured his hesitant followers that huge conscriptionist majorities would be recorded in all the industrial strongholds’.47 If the Labor Party came with him, he told the Party’s Victorian Executive, ‘ninety per cent of the Australian votes will come with us’.48 His confidence met with only limited resistance. In ‘a strong undercurrent of conscriptionist feeling’ beneath Labor’s ‘superstructure’, Maurice Blackburn observed, were the families of volunteers who ‘could see no reason why compulsion should not hasten the going of laggards and “cold-footers”’, and others who ‘complained that the mesh of economic and moral compulsion … spared the “Silvertails” and netted only the workers’.49 In the event, most Labor electorates voted ‘No’, most non-Labor electorates ‘Yes’. But the ‘division’, as Oscar Spate observed, ‘was by no means on straight party lines: 32 Labor and 12 anti-Labor electorates of 1914 voted “No”, 10 Labor and 21 anti-Labor “Yes”’.50 Hughes’ seat of West Sydney, 44 45

Withers, ‘The 1916–1917 Conscription Referenda’: 46. See, for example, Jenny Tilby Stock, ‘Farmers and the Rural Vote in South Australia in World War I: The 1916 Conscription Referendum’, Historical Studies 21 no. 84 (1985): 392, 400ff, who misunderstands the independent force of the factors modelled by Withers and commits the ecological fallacy in her own modelling; Stuart Macintyre, The Oxford History of Australia Volume 4: 1901–1941 (Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1986), 167; Roe, ‘Chivalry and Social Policy in the Antipodes’: 407–408; J.B. Hirst, ‘Australian Defence and Conscription: A Re-Assessment, Part I’, Australian Historical Studies 25 no. 101 (1993): 620, 624n64; Stephen Garton and Peter Stanley, ‘The Great War and Its Aftermath, 1914–22’, in The Cambridge History of Australia, Volume 2: The Commonwealth of Australia, Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre, eds. (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013), 53–54; Joan Beaumont, Broken Nation, Australians and the Great War (Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 2013), 242, 577n139, 587n190. 46 Sir George Foster Pearce, Carpenter to Cabinet: Thirty-Seven Years of Parliament (London: Hutchinson, 1951), 127. 47 Maurice Blackburn, The Conscription Referendum of 1916 (Melbourne: AntiConscription Celebration League, [1936]), 6. 48 Quoted in E.J. Holloway, The Australian Victory over Conscription in 1916–17 ([Melbourne]: Anti-Conscription Jubilee Committee, 1966), 5. 49 Blackburn, The Conscription Referendum of 1916, 10. 50 O.H.K. Spate, Australia (London: Ernest Benn, 1968), 75.

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one of Labor’s safest seats (75.3 per cent voted Labor in 1914) recorded the second highest ‘No’ vote (71.7 per cent).51 Darwin in Tasmania, a Labor seat held by King O’Malley, who opposed conscription though not very volubly, produced one of the biggest ‘Yes’ votes (71.8 per cent).52 Others point to Liberal areas ‘voting against conscription more than some would have judged from their political flavour’.53 ‘In every safe Labour constituency’, according to the Round Table, ‘the majority against conscription’ was ‘less than the majority obtained at the last election by the Labour member’.54 This wasn’t true, however, for New South Wales: in Cook, Dalley, Darling, and South Sydney the ‘No’ vote exceeded the vote recorded by Labor in 1914, whether for the House of Representatives or the Senate. Nor was it true in relation to Labor’s Senate vote in Adelaide.55 Turner’s analysis of the relationship between Labor’s vote in 1914 and the ‘No’ vote in 1916, the standard analysis, starts awkwardly by ‘equating the “No” vote with Labor and the “Yes” vote with anti-Labor’. ‘Overall’, he said, ‘the 1916 “No” vote was 3.5 per cent lower than the 1914 Labor vote; only in New South Wales and South Australia did the Labor [‘No’] vote improve slightly, while in Victoria, Queensland, and Tasmania it dropped by 5 to 6 per cent and in Western Australia slumped disastrously by 25 per cent’.56 Turner doesn’t make it clear whether he is comparing the ‘No’ vote with Labor’s House of Representatives vote or its Senate vote; sometimes he appears to use one, sometimes the other. To add to the confusion, he uses ‘per cent’ to describe differences properly expressed in terms of percentage points; the difference between a ‘No’ vote of 51 per cent and a Senate vote of 52 per cent is one percentage point or 1.9 per cent − not 1.0 per cent. Even when what he has done is clear, some of his figures are wrong or misleading. In 1916, the ‘No’ vote was 0.6 percentage points (2.1 per cent) lower than Labor’s Senate vote and 1.2 percentage points (2.3 per cent) lower than Labor’s vote for the House of Representatives in seats it had contested − not 51

In 1917 West Sydney recorded the highest ‘No’ vote, 76.1 per cent. Colin A. Hughes and B.D. Graham, A Handbook of Australian Government and Politics 1890–1964 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1968), 56; Australian Electoral Commission, Australian Referendums 1906–1999, CD-ROM. 52 Marilyn Lake, A Divided Society: Tasmania During World War I (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1975), 80. 53 For example, Lloyd Robson, A Short History of Tasmania (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1985), 114. 54 ‘Australia’, Round Table, 7 (26), 1917: 387. 55 Australian Electoral Commission, Australian Referendums 1906–1999. 56 Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics, 114.

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3.5 per cent (6.6 percentage points) lower; compared to Labor’s total vote for the House it was 0.7 percentage points (1.4 per cent) higher. In New South Wales the ‘No’ vote was 6.5 percentage points (12.8 per cent) higher than Labor’s Senate vote and 4.9 percentage points (9.4 per cent) higher than Labor’s vote for the House of Representatives − more than a ‘slight’ improvement. In South Australia it was 11 percentage points (23.6 per cent) higher than Labor’s Senate vote – again, more than a ‘slight’ improvement; only in relation to Labor’s vote in the House of Representatives could the improvement (0.4 percentage points) be described as slight. The ‘No’ vote in Victoria − where Melbourne, the seat of government, was ‘the organisational centre of the anti-conscription movement’,57 and where anti-conscriptionists ‘had the closest contact with the military authority’58 − was 5.3 percentage points lower (9.9 per cent) than Labor’s Senate vote; but across the seats Labor had contested for the House it was 3.9 percentage points (7.5 per cent) lower. In Queensland and Tasmania the ‘No’ vote was 5.1 and 6 percentage points (8.9 and 12 per cent) lower than Labor’s Senate vote; but it was 3.4 and 8.6 percentage points (6.1 and 16.4 per cent) lower, respectively, compared with the corresponding Labor vote in the House of Representatives. In Western Australia, where it did indeed drop ‘disastrously’, the ‘No’ vote was 23.3 percentage points (43.5 per cent) lower than Labor’s vote for the Senate; but it was 16.7 percentage points (35.6 per cent) lower than the Labor vote in the House (see Table 3).59 What produced a majority for ‘No’, on the standard view, were the votes of a sufficient number of Liberals, most notably in New South Wales, the biggest State, where the ‘No’ vote exceeded Labor’s Senate vote (and its vote in the House of Representatives) by a substantial margin. In New South Wales, the margin against the proposal (117,879) was more than enough to defeat the proposal which went down by 72,476. Nonetheless with the ‘No’ majorities chalked up in South Australia (31,318) and Queensland (13,831), the New South Wales vote against conscription could have been a good deal narrower – 51.7 per cent instead of 57.1 per cent – and still have carried the day. How important was the Liberal vote in the defeat of the referendum? To secure a majority, the anti-conscriptionists needed a ‘No’ vote of 1,123,795 – 57

Nick Dyrenfurth, ‘”Conscription is Not Abhorrent to Laborites and Socialists”: Revisiting the Australian Labour Movement’s Attitude towards Military Conscription during World War I’, Labour History no. 103 (2012): 149, 159. 58 Blackburn, The Conscription Referendum of 1916, 16. 59 Australian Electoral Commission, Australian Referendums 1906–1999; Hughes and Graham, A Handbook of Australian Government and Politics 1890–1964, 311–314.

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half the number that cast a formal vote plus one. To work out how important the Liberal vote might have been we need to know the number that voted Labor in 1914. For the Senate, this number cannot be calculated; voters could cast from one to six votes for a Labor candidate, but we cannot say how many voters cast six or any other number. We do know the proportion of votes for the Senate that were cast for Labor (52.2 per cent); but here the proportion of votes is not the same as the proportion of voters. For the House, the number that voted Labor is known; but of the 75 electorates Labor contested only 62 and the Liberals 64 (in two cases against Independents). Had the referendum been confined to electorates for the House of Rep­ resentatives contested by both the Labor Party and the Liberals in 1914, the ‘No’ vote would have prevailed with 51.7 per cent of the vote – virtually the same as the vote (51.6 per cent) registered across all 75 seats. However, had the ‘No’ vote depended entirely on those who had voted Labor in 1914 it would have fallen 74,577 votes short. The turnout, however, was much greater in 1916 than in 1914: 1,855,182 compared with 1,726,906 – a difference of 128,276, especially marked among women whose turnout jumped by 84,873. Of these new voters, had 74,577 (58.1 per cent) voted ‘No’, and had all of those who voted Labor in 1914 also voted ‘No’, the referendum would have been defeated without the need for any Liberals to have voted ‘No’. However, we know that not all Labor voters voted ‘No’ and that some Liberals voted ‘Yes’. What we don’t know, and cannot calculate, are their respective proportions. What is clear is that the larger the number of new voters voting ‘No’ the smaller the damage caused to the ‘No’ vote by Labor voters voting ‘Yes’ and the less the dependence of the ‘No’ vote on Liberal voters voting ‘No’. In 1917, the dependence of the anti-conscriptionists on those who had voted for the Nationalists is less in doubt. Labor’s Senate vote in May 1917 was 43.7 per cent, a substantial drop on the corresponding vote (52.2 per cent) in 1914. In addition, the national turnout at the referendum (81.3 per cent) was just 3.6 percentage points higher than the turnout at the election (77.7 per cent), a much smaller increase than the increase between the Senate election in 1914 (72.6 per cent) and the referendum in 1916 (82.8 per cent). And the ‘No’ vote was much higher than Labor’s 1917 Senate vote (Table 3). In short, if the ‘No’ vote was to prevail in 1917 – let alone garner 53.8 per cent of the formal vote − more votes than at the 1916 referendum had to come from those at the preceding election who hadn’t voted Labor.

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Table 3: Labor’s vote in all electorates and in electorates contested by Labor in 1914 and 1917, House of Representatives and Senate, and the ‘No’ vote in the 1916 and 1917 conscription referendums, by State (percentages) ‘No’ vote 1916

NSW

All electorates

Electorates contested by Labor in 1914

57.1

Labor vote 1914 House

Electorates contested* by Labor in House

58.6

52.2

‘No’ vote 1917 Senate

All electorates

Electorates contested byLabor in 1917

52.2 (23/27)

50.6

58.8

Labor vote 1917 House

Electorates contested* by Labor in House

Senate

63.7

41.7

48.0 (20/27)

43.5

48.1

48.9

45.8

52.0 (17/21)

53.4

50.2

51.9

46.6

46.6 (18/21)

44.7

52.3

51.5

55.7

55.7 (8/10)

57.4

56.0

56.7

48.7

48.7 (10/10)

48.0

SA

57.6

56.8

57.2

57.2 (6/7)

46.6

55.1

55.9

41.3

41.3 (6/7)

42.9

WA

30.3

27.8

47.0

47.0 (4/5)

53.6

35.6

35.3

34.4

34.4 (4/5)

31.8

Tas

43.8

42.5

52.4

52.4 (4/5)

49.8

49.8

48.7

40.1

40.1 (4/5)

40.5

National

51.6

51.7

50.9

52.8 (62/75)

52.2

53.8

56.1

43.9

46.0 (62/75)

43.7

* Number contested by Labor and total number of seats in brackets

Electorates not contested by Labor in 1914 (N = 15): Cowper, Parramatta, Richmond (Liberal, NSW); Newcastle (Labor, NSW); Kooyong, Wimmera (Liberal, Vic); Gippsland (Ind, Vic); Batman, Melbourne Ports, Yarra (Labor, Vic); Kennedy, Maranoa (Labor, Qld); Angas (Liberal, SA); Kalgoorlie (Labor, WA); Franklin (Liberal, Tas).

Electorates not contested by Labor in 1917 (N = 13): Cowper, New England, North Sydney, Parramatta, Richmond, Riverina (Nationalist, NSW); East Sydney (Labor, NSW); Kooyong, Wimmera (Nationalist, Vic); Ballarat (Labor, Vic); Adelaide (Labor, SA); Swan (Nationalist, WA); Franklin (Nationalist, Tas).

Source: Australian Electoral Commission, Australian Referendums 1906–1999, CD-ROM (Canberra, Commonwealth of Australia, 2000); Colin A. Hughes and B.D. Graham, Voting for the Australian House of Representatives 1901–1964 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1964), 54–71.

Chapter Five

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Vic Qld

T he Conscription Conflict and the Great War

Women Far from being overlooked by historians, as Withers suggests,60 the idea that the votes of women mattered was asserted from the start. ‘“The women did it”, complained the conscriptionists’, after the first ballot.61 ‘Our private opinion’, said the official organ of the Returned Soldier and Patriot’s League of Queensland, after the second referendum, ‘is that the women were the deciding factor’.62 James Bryce also reported the belief that ‘women voters of all classes largely contributed to the defeat of [the first] proposal. ‘Western Australia, in which it was carried’, he added, ‘has the smallest proportion of women’.63 Withers’ conclusion is at odds with these. Certainly, in some quarters women had been expected to vote ‘Yes’. In 1916, Bean was confident the referendum would be carried, ‘predicting support from women would be decisive’.64 Pearce, too, says that before the vote it ‘was assumed’ that ‘many thousands of the relatives, particularly the mothers, of the men at the War … would vote almost unanimously in the affirmative’. But he didn’t think this after the vote; ‘we had not reckoned’, he confessed, on the ‘ingenious’ appeals made to these women and on their ‘silent vote’.65 Perhaps he had in mind the poem (mis)attributed to W.R. Winspear and illustrated by Claude Marquet. E.J. Holloway believed it was this that had ‘decided the votes’ in 1917 ‘of perhaps tens of thousands of women’.66 Watson, playing around with masculinity ratios, concluded that ‘the women’s vote’ probably ‘varied just as much as the men’s vote across the States’.67 Turner reached a similar conclusion. ‘Both sides’, he noted, ‘made particular appeals to women voters’, and the anti-conscription propaganda, in particular, ‘[i]t was thought … might have had a considerable effect’; but Turner’s ‘analysis of the voting figures’− what form this took he doesn’t say − ‘suggests this was not so’.68 A sense of frustration with the voting returns was common. The Argus had suggested that separate ballot-boxes be used for 60 61

Withers, ‘The 1916–1917 Conscription Referenda’: 45–46. Pam Young, Proud to be a Rebel: The Life and Times of Emma Miller (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1991), 224. 62 Cited in Carmel Shute, ‘”Blood Votes” and the “Bestial Boche”: A Case Study in Propaganda’, Hecate: A Women’s Interdisciplinary Journal II no. 2 (1976): 20. 63 James Bryce, Modern Democracies, Vol II (London: Macmillan, 1929), 199n1. 64 Peter Rees, Bearing Witness (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2015), 273. 65 Pearce, Carpenter to Cabinet, 138. 66 Holloway, The Australian Victory over Conscription in 1916–17, 14. 67 Watson, A Brief Analysis of Public Opinion in Australia during the Past Six Years, 12. 68 Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics, 114–15.

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men and women.69 Of course, this didn’t happen. ‘Was it true’, Ken Inglis asks, ‘that the silent vote of mothers and wives was hostile to conscription?’ His answer: ‘We may never know’.70 Since men accounted for 54.1 per cent of the turnout (and, if anything, an even greater proportion of the formal vote), for the women’s vote to have made the difference between the acceptance of the 1916 referendum and its rejection it would have to have been more lop-sidedly ‘No’ than the men’s vote was lop-sidedly ‘Yes’. The only direct knowledge we have of how men voted was the vote of the forces overseas; overwhelming male, unmarried and under 30, with an under-representation of primary producers and an over-representation of labourers, those who voted overseas represented more than 10 per cent of all the men who turned out to vote and a much higher proportion of the single men that did so.71 Among the troops the ‘Yes’ vote prevailed, 55.1: 44.9. Keith Murdoch believed had those voting ‘No’ had experienced war on the Western front; those still training, and whose life experience for the moment more closely resembled those back home, were among those voting ‘Yes’.72 So, while the men in the military were not a microcosm of the male electorate the idea that it was the votes of women that turned it around is not entirely fanciful, especially if the older men were more likely to have favoured conscription than younger men.73 However, since the final ‘No’ vote was 51.6 per cent, if the men at home voted ‘Yes’ 55:45, as the troops are reported to have done, a decisive ‘No’ vote from women would have required the votes of women to have split roughly 40:60 – even if we assume formal voting rates to have been the same; about 43:57 were the vote among men to have divided 53:47; and closer to 45:55 if men 69 Robson, The First A.I.F., p. 107. 70 Inglis, ‘Conscription in Peace and War, 1911–1945’, 39. 71 L.L. Robson, ‘The Origin and Character of the First AIF, 1914–18: Some Statistical Evidence’, Historical Studies 15 no. 61 (1973): 738–39, for data on the recruits’ age, marital status and occupation. For the Census data on occupations, with which the data for the AIF are not readily comparable, see Glen Withers, Anthony M. Endres and Len Perry, ‘Labour’, in Australians: Historical Statistics, Wray Vamplew, ed. (Broadway: Fairfax, Syme & Weldon, 1987), 148. Graham Seal, Inventing Anzac: The Digger and National Mythology (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2004), 175, pulls together much of the data on the AIF; but his statement that ‘the social makeup of the AIF’ in 1911 ‘closely mirrored that of the male segment of Australian society’ is misleading. 72 Fitzhardinge, The Little Digger 1914–1952, 207–209. 73 John McQuilton, Rural Australia and the Great War: From Tarrawingee to Tangambalanga (Carlton South: Melbourne University Press, 2001), 68, notes that cartoonists assumed this, ‘probably’ correctly he suggests.

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voted 51:49 − a vote that, in turn, would have required men at home to have voted 50.5:49.5, given how the men overseas had voted. In 1917, when men accounted for a greater proportion (54.6 per cent) of the turnout, the troops represented roughly 16 per cent of the male vote. The electorate’s overall vote against conscription was also slightly greater (46.2:53.8). Now the women’s vote would have to have been even more heavily lop-sided had their vote been decisive, notwithstanding that support for conscription among the troops (52.5:47.5) had narrowed with support for conscription ‘thought to have come more from men in camps in Britain and on transports rather than those at the front’.74 If 53 per cent of men had voted ‘Yes’, at least 62 per cent of women would have had to have voted ‘No’ (again, ignoring what was very likely a higher rate of informal voting among women). If 51 per cent of men, including members of the AIF, had voted ‘Yes’ (a vote that would still have required 50.5 per cent of men at home to have voted ‘Yes’) nearly 60 per cent of women would have to have voted ‘No’ for there to have been a ‘No’ vote of 53.8 per cent overall.75 Even if the votes of women were not decisive the balance of probabilities is that women voted ‘No’ either because they were less likely than men to support the war or less likely than men to support conscription to fight the war.76 74 75

76

Joan Beaumont, Broken Nation, Australians and the Great War (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2013), 387. An ecological analysis of the vote in 1919, the first election after the 1917 referendum, purports to show that of the women who voted three-quarters supported Labor, a similar proportion of the men voting non-Labor; Christian Leithner, ‘A Gender Gap in Australia? Commonwealth Elections 1910–96’, Australian Journal of Political Science, 32 no. 1 (1997): 33–34. If this were true – and the result is highly implausible − it would mean that women had voted ‘No’ in 1917 by a much bigger margin than required in our analysis, there being no other circumstance other than opposition to conscription that might account for such a polarisation. However, Leithner’s analysis, which presupposes the opposite conclusion to that reached by Withers’, is flawed and for similar reasons. For a critique of the methods on which Leithner relies, see King, A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem, 121–22. In more recent times, both support for Australia’s engagement in war and support for conscription to fight those wars appear to have been less widespread among women than among men even when women have been less likely to vote Labor than to vote for the Coalition. For Korea, where only volunteers were deployed, see: Australian Public Opinion Polls nos. 700–710, July–August 1950; nos. 732–743, December 1950 & Jan. 1951; nos. 855–642, May–June 1952. For Vietnam, see: Murray Goot and Rodney Tiffen, ‘Public Opinion and the Politics of the Polls’, in Australia’s Vietnam, Peter King, ed. (Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1983), 146–47; and J.S. Western and P.R. Wilson, ‘Attitudes to Conscription’, in Forward and Reece, eds. Conscription in Australia, 231. For Australia’s engagement in the Gulf War, for which there was no conscription, see Murray Goot, ‘The Polls’, in Murray Goot and Rodney Tiffen, eds. Australia’s Gulf War (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1992), 164–66. 

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Rural Voters The idea that rural voters hold the key to the defeat of the 1916 referendum was there from the start as well. Shortly after the referendum, the Round Table claimed that ‘in the country the “No” totals are in almost every case far in advance of the Labour vote at the last election’; that ‘the large country vote for “No” carried the scale against the proposal’; and that crucial was a ‘large section’, Liberal voters generally, ‘fearful of a shortage of labour’.77 Was any of this true? The ‘No’ vote exceeded the Labor vote in 24 rural electorates, but it fell short in 19. In only 11 seats could the ‘No’ vote be described as ‘far in advance’ if by that we mean, however arbitrarily, exceeding the Labor vote in both the House and the Senate by at least 10 percentage points; seven of these seats were in New South Wales, three in South Australia, one in Queensland. In rural Australia, the ‘No’ vote exceeded the Labor vote in only nine seats; in the other 23, the ‘No’ vote fell short of Labor’s House vote, Senate vote, or both. However, the ‘swing’ from voting patterns at the 1914 election is not necessarily the best place from which to start. The majority of voters (51.8 per cent) in rural seats voted ‘No’; but so, too, did the majority of voters (50.5 per cent) in metropolitan seats (Table 4). Had the rural vote been the same as the vote in the cities, the referendum would still have been defeated. What is true nationally is also true of New South Wales and South Australia. In New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia, almost every rural electorate voted ‘No’; but in Victoria and Tasmania, as well as in Western Australia, almost every rural electorate voted ‘Yes’. The difference (27.3 percentage points) between the ‘No’ vote in metropolitan Western Australia and metropolitan South Australia was as great as the difference between the ‘No’ vote in rural Western Australia and rural South Australia (27.5 percentage points), rural New South Wales (27.4 percentage points) or rural Queensland (21.9 percentage points). As Table 4 shows, the story in 1917, when Queensland’s metropolitan seats and Tasmania’s rural seats shifted to ‘No’, is very similar. Singling out ‘the farmers and Conservatives’, Hughes decried what he called the ‘selfish’ vote.78 Others suggested less self-regarding motives. Farmers who had already suffered a labour shortage during the “Call-up”, Jauncey reports, were told ‘that coloured labour would replace white on the farms’.79 Notably absent were attempts to invoke the ‘frontiersmen’ with 77 ‘Australia’, Round Table 7 (26), 1917: 387. 78 See Neville Meaney, Australia and the World Crisis, 1914–1923 (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2009), 181, who thinks this view ‘astute’. 79 Jauncey, The Story of Conscription in Australia, 218.

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their “dislike of authority” and “antipathy to control and particularly to any direct control”; 80 Manning Clark’s Tocquevillian celebration of the ‘courage’ of those imbued by ‘the bush culture’ who stood up ‘to the tyranny of opinion in the country’ – the local papers and Shire Councils that supported conscription – hardly qualifies as an exception.81 ‘Ultimately’, Turner famously concluded, ‘the defeat of the referendum came down to this: a good season, and a shortage of labour, caused initially by the high enlistment of country men and accentuated by the ill-advised call-up … it was the non-Labor farmers who defeated the government’s proposals’.82 Turner’s account became the received wisdom.83 Even Withers’ analysis didn’t dislodge it.84 It is possible, of course, that farmers accounted for the difference between the vote in the cities and the vote in rural areas. But it is also possible that this remarkably small difference (1.3 percentage points) has little to do with how those on the land voted. Farmers and their employees were not the only people in the countryside to have the vote; on the figures provided by Withers, ‘primary producers’ appear to have accounted for no more than half the eligible voters in rural electorates.85 ‘The so-called “farmers’ vote” which produced such remarkable NO majorities in N.S.W., South Australia and Queensland in 1916 and 1917’, the most extensive study of the referendums concludes, ‘was largely comprised of itinerant unionists, small shopkeepers and self-employed tradesmen’.86 80

Russel Ward, The Australian Legend (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1958), 227–28. 81 C.M.H. Clark, A History of Australia, VI: ‘The Old Tree Dead and the Young Green Tree’ 1916–1935 (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1987), 35–36. 82 Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics; ‘1914–1939’, in A New History of Australia, Frank Crowley, ed. (Melbourne: William Heinemann, 1974), 336. The most impressive attempt to argue the impact of economic circumstance on rural producers is Stock, ‘Farmers and the Rural Vote in South Australia in World War I’. See also Peter Bastian, ‘The 1916 Conscription Referendum in New South Wales’, Teaching History 5 no. 1 (1971): 33. 83 See, for example, Nick Dyrenfurth, Heroes & Villains: The Rise and Fall of the Early Australian Labor Party (North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2011), 214. For a dissenting note, which argues that Turner adopts a ‘negative approach with purely coincidental factors’, see J. Alcock, ‘Reasons for the Rejection of Conscription 1916–17’, Historicus 6 (2) 1972: 14. 84 However, Margaret Levi, Consent, Dissent, and Patriotism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 123, follows Withers. 85 Withers, ‘The 1916–1917 Conscription Referenda’: 44n11. Lake notes the different vot­ ing patterns in farming districts and country towns in Tasmania; A Divided Society, 81. 86 Metherell, ‘The Conscription Referenda, October 1916 and December 1917’, 558.

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Table 4: Votes cast against conscription in Metropolitan and Rural Electorates at the 1916 and 1917 referendums, by State 1916 Referendum Metropolitan electorates

1917 Referendum

Rural electorates

No (%)

Total

NSW*

347,435

186,113 (53.6)

373,445

Vic

359,110

182,746 (50.9)

323,036

Qld

108,572

52,797 (48.6)

193,679

SA

98,210

54,179 (55.2)

108,950

WA

60,261

16,802 (27.9)

Tas

19,620

9,076 (46.3)

Total

993,208

501,713 (50.5)

1,140,509

No (%)

Metropolitan electorates

Rural electorates

Total

No (%)

Total

No (%)

222,392 (59.6)

320,616

177,526 (55.4)

333,358

210,931 (63.3)

145,434 (45.2)

320,313

168,176 (52.5)

286,595

138,536 (48.3)

105,254 (54.3)

99,402

51,222 (51.5)

175,454

104,729 (59.7)

65,059 (59.7)

86,891

47,012 (54.1)

88,348

51,265 (58.0)

74,692

24,082 (32.2)

51,698

16,176 (31.3)

59,560

21,972 (36.9)

66,707

28,757 (41.1)

17,108

8,355 (48.8)

53,342

26,716 (50.1)

590,978 (51.8)

896,028

468,467 (52.3)

996,657

554,149 (55.6)

* Excludes the extra-metropolitan electorates of Illawarra, Nepean, Newcastle

Metropolitan electorates: Cook, Dalley, East Sydney, Lang, North Sydney, Parkes, Parramatta, South Sydney, Wentworth, West Sydney (NSW); Balaclava, Batman, Bourke, Fawkner, Henty, Kooyong, Maribyrnong, Melbourne, Melbourne Ports, Yarra (Victoria); Brisbane, Lilley, Oxley (Qld); Adelaide, Boothby, Hindmarsh (SA); Fremantle, Perth (WA); Denison (Tasmania) Rural electorates: Barrier, Calare, Cowper, Darling, Eden-Monaro, Gwydir, Hume, Hunter, Macquarie, New England, Richmond, Riverina, Robertson, Werriwa (NSW); Ballaarat, Bendigo, Corangamite, Corio, Echuca, Flinders, Gippsland, Grampians, Indi, Wannon, Wimmera (Victoria); Capricornia, Darling Downs, Herbert, Kennedy, Maranoa, Moreton, Wide Bay (Qld); Angas, Barker, Grey, Wakefield (SA); Dampier, Kalgoorlie, Swan (WA); Bass, Darwin, Franklin, Wilmot (Tasmania) Source: Australian Electoral Commission, Australian Referendums 1906–1999, CD-ROM (Canberra, Commonwealth of Australia, 2000); Malcolm Mackerras, pers. comm., for the categorisation of electorates.

Chapter Five

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Protestants and Catholics The Protestant vote is assumed to have divided in favour of conscription; how one-sidedly is not often asked, notwithstanding that ‘a large number of nonCatholics would have been necessary to secure each narrow rejection of the Government’s proposals’.87 To quote Inglis: ‘Hundreds of thousands of people who put themselves down at the census as adherents of Protestant churches must have disregarded the passionate and almost unanimous advice of their clergy to vote “Yes”.’88 The phrase ‘put themselves down at the census’ is never used of Catholics, always seen as more devout or closer to their church and its leaders than Protestants.89 The question of what other evidence we have of the Protestant vote is rarely raised. What we have instead, chapter and verse, are pronouncements from the pulpit, at public meetings, and in the press.90 It is the Catholic vote − more particularly, the votes of Irish Catholics − around which debate is focused. This is partly because of a continuing fascination with the impact of events in Ireland during Easter 1916. For Robson, Catholics who ‘would have given their last man and shilling’ before the rising ‘became overnight the eager and resolute opponents of conscription’,91 a view amplified by Wayne Hudson who sees events in Ireland converting Australian opinion away from the view that the country was ‘best defended by citizens armies universally conscripted’.92 For others, however, the impact of the rebellion was limited; ‘the Irish in Australia did not need any Irish lessons’, said Patrick O’Farrell.93 Press reaction − Catholic and other − casts doubt on the idea that the expatriate Irish immediately sympathised with the rebels.94 What is beyond doubt is that there was no Protestant equivalent to Mannix, Archbishop of Melbourne from May 1917 and coadjutor Archbishop before that. ‘Lacking any figure so colourful, the anti-conscriptionists boosted Mannix. So did the conscriptionists, hoping to 87

Alan D. Gilbert, ‘Protestants, Catholics and Loyalty: An Aspect of the Conscription Controversies, 1916–17’, Politics VI no. I (1971): 20. 88 Inglis, ‘Conscription in Peace and War, 1911–1945’, p. 39. 89 Michael McKernan, ‘Catholics, Conscription and Archbishop Mannix’, Historical Studies 17 no. 68 (1977): 299. 90 See, for example, Michael McKernan, The Australian Churches at War: Attitudes and Activities of the Major Churches 1914–1918 (Sydney and Canberra: Catholic Theological Faculty and the Australian War Memorial, 1980), Ch. 8. 91 Robson, The First A.I.F., p. 95. 92 W.J. Hudson, ‘Strategy for Survival’, in Australia: Two Centuries of War and Peace, M. McKernan and M. Browne, eds. (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1988), 37. 93 Patrick O’Farrell, The Irish in Australia (Kensington: University of New South Wales Press, 1987), 271. 94 Gibson, ‘The Conscription Issue in South Australia, 1916–1917’: 66.

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arouse against Mannix … a British and Protestant determination to defeat all that seemed rebellious, disloyal, foreign and Popish within the Australian community.’95 But even among Catholics, Mannix was a singular figure. Catholics, as he acknowledged, were divided. So were the leading Catholic clergy and the Catholic press.96 If Catholics enlisted ‘in rough proportion to their percentage in the population as a whole’,97 did most Catholics nevertheless vote ‘No’?98 John Hirst argues with certainty that on conscription Mannix was ‘not representing the views of Catholic people’.99 Frank Clarke is equally confident that he was: ‘There is no doubt that Mannix represented the majority of Roman Catholics.’100 Doubtless, the views of Catholics were divided. How and why? ‘[T]he few wealthier Catholics’, says Niall Brennan, ‘voted Yes; the great majority, who were working class, voted No’. Voting ‘went more or less along the political alignment’.101 Michael McKernan, for whom Catholics were essentially working class, sees ‘the Catholic response’ as ‘a class response much more than a religious or national one’, though he also suggests that the feelings of working class Catholics were as much about their Catholicism as about their class.102 Laurie Fitzhardinge says that ‘those Irish (or Catholics) who had attained a higher social status tended to vote with their class rather than on ethnic or religious grounds’.103 How did he know? McKernan reports the decline in circulation of the pro-conscription Freeman’s Journal and the rise in circulation of the anti-conscription Catholic Press.104 Were their readers’ working class or middle class?

95

Patrick O’Farrell, The Catholic Church and Community: An Australian Story (Kensington: University of New South Wales Press, 1985), 333. 96 Brenda Niall, Mannix (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2015), 87. 97 Jeffrey Grey, A Military History of Australia, Third edition (Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 90. 98 The questions at the head of this and three of the next four paragraphs derive from Gibson, ‘The Conscription Issue in South Australia, 1916–1917’: 63. 99 J.B. Hirst, ‘Australian Defence and Conscription: A Reassessment (Part I)’, Australian Historical Studies 25 no. 101 (1993): 624. 100 F.G. Clarke, Australia, A Concise Political and Social History (Sydney: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 199. 101 Niall Brennan, Dr Mannix (Adelaide: Rigby, 1964), 134. 102 McKernan, ‘Catholics, Conscription and Archbishop Mannix’: 300, 306, 309, 314. 103 Fitzhardinge, The Little Digger 1914–1952, 202. 104 McKernan, ‘Catholics, Conscription and Archbishop Mannix’: 304. In 1917, the Freeman’s Journal switched from ‘Yes’ to ‘No’; Jeff Kildea, Tearing the Fabric: Sectarianism in Australia, 1910–1925 (Sydney: Citadel Books, 2002), 169.

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The ‘largest majorities for “No”’, as Inglis notes, ‘were in New South Wales, which had a high proportion of Catholics [25.0 per cent in the 1911 Census, 23.9 per cent in 1921], and South Australia, where the proportion was low [14.1 per cent and 13.5 per cent, respectively] ’.105 Victoria, which voted ‘Yes’ in 1916 but ‘No’ in 1917, had fewer Catholics (21.8 per cent; 21.1 per cent) than Queensland (23.9 per cent; 23.4 per cent) which voted ‘No’ on both occasions. Western Australia had roughly the same proportion of Catholics (22.0 per cent; 20.0 per cent) as Victoria, though it voted ‘Yes’ by big margins on both occasions. Tasmania, where the proportion of Catholics (17.1 per cent; 16.6 per cent) was almost as low as in South Australia, also voted ‘Yes’ on both occasions. Even if States ‘with much the same propor­ tion of Catholics’ hadn’t ‘recorded widely different percentages of negative votes’,106 this kind of analysis wouldn’t help very much. Nor does an analysis that shows an inverse relationship between how States voted and the views of the Catholic archbishop.107 Catholics might have voted ‘No’, as most believe, even in States that voted ‘Yes’; or ‘Yes’, as the Round Table suggested, even in States that voted ‘No’.108 If most Catholics did vote ‘No’ was this because of Mannix? ‘Large num­bers of Catholics, desperately seeking acceptance in a mildly hostile society’, says Brennan, ‘might have voted Yes had not Dr Mannix given his prestige to their political faith’.109 Others think the influence of Mannix much exaggerated.110 ‘Had Mannix’, says Naomi Turner, ‘been on the side of conscription he would not have had the Catholic workers with him’.111 Blackburn thought Catholics were converted from ‘Yes’ to ‘No’; but not by Mannix and not for the reasons Brennan advances. Outside Western Australia, ‘hermetically sealed against anti-conscriptionist ideas’, Blackburn 105 Inglis, ‘Conscription in Peace and War, 1911–1945’, 39. The figures on religious affiliation here and below are calculated from W.W. Phillips, ‘Religion’, in Australians: Historical Statistics, Wray Vamplew, ed. (Broadway: Fairfax, Syme & Weldon, 1987), 421–26. 106 F.B. Smith, The Conscription Plebiscites in Australia, 1916–17, Fourth edition ([Melbourne]: Victorian Historical Association, 1974), 34. 107 B.A. Santamaria, Daniel Mannix: A Biography (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1984), 81. ‘The Catholic press tended to echo the sentiments of their respective bishops’; Michael Gilchrist, Daniel Mannix: Priest and Patriot (Blackburn: Dove Communications, 1982), 37. 108 ‘Australia’, Round Table 7 no. 26 (1917): 387. 109 Brennan, Dr Mannix, 137. 110 See, for example, Spate, Australia, 75. 111 Naomi Turner, Catholics in Australia: A Social History Vol I (North Blackburn: Collins Dove, 1992), 305.

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argues, ‘Catholic men and women who, in 1915, would have given the last man and last shilling became, after the Easter rising’ and ‘the cold-blooded executions of the rebel survivors … almost of an instant, eager and resolute opponents of Conscription’.112 Mannix might have boasted that among the 1,200,000 ‘No’ votes were 200,000 Catholics; but since Catholics were 20 per cent of the electorate and the total vote was 2,247,000, Gibson points out, a ‘No’ vote of 200,000 would have accounted for less than 10 per cent of the electorate (or, she might have added, less than 20 per cent of the ‘No’ vote). Mannix, she concludes, ‘was either a weak statistician, or advocate, or both’. If Mannix was more persuasive than other Catholics, she suggests, it was because Catholics weren’t too keen to give ‘the last man and the last shilling’ before the Easter uprising. The Irish, Gibson believes, were affected by a general distancing from England common among those long resident in Australia; this echoes, though it doesn’t reference, Robertson’s thesis.113 O’Farrell puts it somewhat differently. For Irish Catholics a ‘No’ vote sym­ bolised their opposition to ‘the enslaving program of the ascendancy party’ that had ‘sought to exclude or demean Catholics of Irish origin’ since the 1820s.114 Either way, the attitudes of Irish Catholics ‘appear to have been oldestablished, and not difficult to understand’.115 Did Mannix’s intervention, on balance, help the ‘No’ cause? ‘It is doubtful if he induced one single person to vote NO who would not already for person­a l motives decided to vote that way’, Herbert Moran, a Catholic himself, would later remark. ‘On the contrary’, he added, ‘he must have pro­ voked many into voting YES who had thought there was an excellent case for opposing conscription on economic grounds’. This, notwithstanding that he attracted ‘a most fervidly enthusiastic crowd of supporters by no means exclusively Catholic’.116 A.G.L. Shaw notes that Victoria voted ‘Yes’ while New South Wales, where ‘Archbishop Kelly had been an early and outspoken advocate of universal service’, voted ‘No’. Mannix’s stand, he observes, ‘gave plenty of scope to anti-Catholic and anti-Irish feeling’.117 Opposition to conscription among Catholics, says Blackburn, ‘was offset by the defection of Protestants who defended Conscription on the ground that it was needed 112 Blackburn, The Conscription Referendum of 1916, 12–13. 113 Gibson, ‘The Conscription Issue in South Australia, 1916–1917’: 65–67. 114 O’Farrell, The Irish in Australia, 271. 115 Gibson, ‘The Conscription Issue in South Australia, 1916–1917’: 65–67. 116 Herbert M. Moran, Viewless Winds: Being the Recollections and Digressions of an Australian Surgeon (London: Peter Davies, 1939), 157, 159. 117 Shaw, The Story of Australia, 225.

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to save Australia from becoming a Catholic country’.118 That Mannix might have lost as many votes as he won is not an isolated view.119 The idea that Mannix powerfully influenced the ‘No’ vote is generally argued more emphatically in relation to the 1917 referendum − much more clearly ‘a Hughes versus Mannix contest’120 − than in relation to the 1916 ballot. The head of the Special Intelligence Bureau had not ‘the slightest hesitation’ in accepting that ‘ninety per cent. of the Roman Catholics in this country voted “No”’ [in 1917] and did all they could to induce others to do likewise’.121 Since Victoria switched from ‘Yes’ to ‘No’, ‘[p]erhaps Mannix’s more active role in the campaign helped’, suggests a more sympathetic source.122 More Catholics than in 1916, concerned about the threat to Catholic schools posed by the possible conscription of teaching Brothers and seminarians, may have voted ‘No’, especially after the Pope issued a statement against conscription.123 Equally, it may have been Hughes’ ‘crudely sectarian tactics’ that ‘proved counter-productive’.124 In any event, a shift towards ‘No’ was not confined to Victoria; in every State except South Australia the proportion voting ‘No’ in 1917 was greater than in 1916. While the actions of the Catholic clergy are well known what about strategies of the Protestant churches? In North Eastern Victoria, Methodists were ‘the strongest regional supporters of conscription in 1916’.125 In South Australia, the Methodist came out in favour of conscription.126 Nonetheless, in Victoria and New South Wales ‘the Presbyterians and the Methodists feared a split in their denominations if the conscription cause was pursued too aggressively’, says Oliver. The Director of Presbyterian Mission Homes thought Presbyterians ‘equally divided on conscription’. This may have affected the vote in Victoria, where Presbyterians were ‘particularly strong’.127 Nearly one-in-five Victorians (18.5 per cent in the 1911 Census, 17.3 per cent in 1921) were Presbyterians – almost as many as were Catholics – a higher 118 Blackburn, The Conscription Referendum of 1916, 13. 119 See, for example, Niall, Mannix, 87. 120 Santamaria, Daniel Mannix, 88. 121 Cited in Beaumont, Broken Nation, 387. 122 Gilchrist, Daniel Mannix, 61. 123 Kildea, Tearing the Fabric, 163–65, 171–79. 124 Gilchrist, Daniel Mannix, 61. 125 McQuilton, Rural Australia and the Great War, 69. 126 J.T. Gilchrist and W. J. Murray, eds. Eye-Witness: Selected Documents from Australia’s Past (Adelaide: Rigby, 1968), 182–83. 127 Oliver, War and Peace in Western Australia, 98.

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proportion than in Queensland (13.1 per cent, 12.6 per cent) or New South Wales (11.5 per cent, 10.8 per cent), let alone Western Australia (10.1 per cent, 9.0 per cent), Tasmania (8.6 per cent, 6.9 per cent) or South Australia (5.8 per cent, 5.2 per cent).128 In Victoria, the votes of Presbyterians might have made the ‘No’ vote less reliant on the votes of Catholics, however inspired. In Western Australia and Tasmania, the presence of Presbyterians could have done little to deflate the ‘Yes’ vote. But we might also note that in South Australia, with the lowest proportion of Presbyterians, the ‘No’ vote fell not far short of that in New South Wales where the proportion was twice as high.

Conclusion The focus of Australian political scientists on constitutional referendums may help explain why so few of them have looked at the results of 1916 and 1917 referendums. That these referendums were not about changing the Constitution has not deterred historians. ‘We have some understanding of how No cases are run’, says Hirst, drawing on the history of constitutional referendums: ‘raise every bogey until you find one that bites’.129 To understand the ‘No’ vote for conscription, Eric Andrews argued, one has to understand that ‘Australian voters commonly vote “No” in referenda’ in order ‘to irritate a government and politicians they are displeased with … The only surprise is that so many Australians voted “Yes”’.130 The key to understanding the 1916 defeat, said Barry Smith, lay in the ‘reluctance’ of the Australian people ‘to concede powers to the central government’, a reluctance ‘already twice demonstrated’ at constitutional referendums in 1911 and 1913.131 He might also have noted two consistent patterns in referendums held before 1916: a ‘Yes’ vote in Western Australia and a ‘No’ vote in New South Wales.132 And, with the benefit of an even longer view, he might have noted that no referendum had ever been approved when the major parties had taken 128 Phillips, ‘Religion’, 421–26. 129 Hirst, ‘Australian Defence and Conscription’: 616. 130 E.M. Andrews, The Anzac Illusion: Anglo-Australian Relations During World War I (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 123. 131 Smith, The Conscription Plebiscites in Australia, 20. Strictly speaking, it had been dem­onstrated not twice, if Smith is right, but eight times in 1911 (two questions) and 1913 (six). 132 Conrad Joyner, The Commonwealth and Monopolies (Melbourne: F.W. Cheshire, 1963), 83; Jean Holmes and Campbell Sharman, The Australian Federal System (Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1977), 79–80, for the figures.

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different sides. Yet the closeness of the vote in 1916 challenges ‘[t]he first law of Australian referendums … that a winning proposal needs bipartisan support as a necessary prerequisite’.133 Even if we assume, boldly, that voters distinguish between constitutional and non-constitutional referendums, the practice of drawing on Australia’s experience with constitutional refer­en­ dums to explain the results of non-constitutional referendums has much to commend it. In 1916 and 1917 high turnouts almost certainly helped legitimise the results, not only among opponents of conscription but also among supporters. The size of the turnout might have been especially important had the referendum been carried; Edmund Barton, now on the High Court, and said to have urged Hughes to hold a referendum, ‘probably thought that if Australian voters were consulted they would give the outcomes a special validity independent of the manoeuvres of the politicians’.134 To suggest that the result was ‘merely advisory’, as lawyers are wont to do,135 doesn’t capture the status of the result, politically. Had Hughes won would he not have acted even if he had anticipated, as Donald Horne surmised, ‘there might be violent resistance’?136 After the first referendum would the Senate, as Ernest Scott suggests, have turned its back on the result and stood in his way?137 Perhaps it would have, with senators arguing: that Hughes’ attempt to go over the heads of the State Party Executives ‘was contrary to the principle on which the party policy was determined and applied’;138 that ‘the machinery 133 Brian Galligan, A Federal Republic: Australia’s Constitutional System of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 128, emphasis added. For a close result that challenges the standard view about the necessary conditions for success in a constitutional referendum, see Murray Goot and Sean Scalmer, ‘Party Leaders, the Media, and Political Persuasion: The Campaigns of Evatt and Menzies on the Referendum to Protect Australia from Communism’, Australian Historical Studies 44 no. 1 (2013): 71–88. 134 Geoffrey Bolton, Edmund Barton: The One Man for the Job (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 2000), 324. 135 Williams and Hume, People Power, 250. 136 Donald Horne, In Search of Billy Hughes (South Melbourne: Macmillan, 1979), 79. According to Scott, Fisher’s fears about the destruction of rural property had conscription been introduced were ‘well-grounded’; Australia during the War, 356. 137 Ibid., 361–62. The situation following the second referendum was quite different. With Hughes’ having a majority in both Houses, the prior question was why he felt it necessary to hold the referendum at all; Robson, The A.I.F., 168. 138 L.F. Crisp, The Australian Federal Labour Party 1901–1951 (London: Longmans, Green, 1955), 136. Labor’s Federal executive, established in 1915 and ‘a pathetic and powerless body’ at the time, ‘never met’ during the 1916 crisis; Patrick Weller and Beverley Lloyd, eds. Federal Executive Minutes 1915–1955 (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1978), 10.

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Chapter Five

of censorship and surveillance’ that Hughes brought to bear during the campaigns undermined the legitimacy of the vote;139 and that to allow the majority to compel individuals to fight was a ‘prostitution of the demo­ cratic system’.140 To Blackburn, however, a strong opponent of conscription, a ‘Yes’ vote would have constituted ‘a mandate which only a handful of parliamentarians would have dared to disobey’.141 Certainly, the anticonscription manifesto declared that a ‘Yes’ vote would give the government ‘the power’ to act;142 a countervailing power that might be exercised by the Senate wasn’t mentioned. We will never know, of course. But we shouldn’t assume that a different result would not have carried considerable weight just because it would not have mandated a change to the Constitution. Anti-conscriptionists attacked the first proposal put to the people for using ‘tendentious’ language, including ‘fram[ing] a question from which the word conscription is wholly eliminated’.143 They attacked the second – they had attacked the first as well − for using ‘loaded’ language and for not spelling out what the proposal actually meant:144 it ‘mentioned neither compulsion nor the ballot’ and ‘it presupposed full knowledge of the gov­ ernment’s plans’.145 The phrase ‘in this grave emergency’ left open the question of whether voluntary enlistment might suffice. The phrase ‘for reinforcing the Australian Imperial Forces Overseas’ begged the question of whether there ‘could be no reinforcements save conscripts’. ‘Probably’ 139 Joan Beaumont, ‘The Politics of a Divided Society’, in Australia’s War, 1914–18, Joan Beaumont, ed. (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1995), 48, for the quote. Contrast this with the claim that by reworking the anti-conscriptionists rhetoric censorship increased the ‘appeal it now held for the uncommitted voter’; Kevin Fewster, ‘The Operation of State Apparatuses in Time of Crisis: Censorship and Conscription, 1916’, War & Society 3 no. 1 (1985): 50. 140 H.E. Boote, cited in Beaumont, Broken Nation, 231. 141 Blackburn, The Conscription Referendum of 1916, 6. Blackburn had helped persuade Hughes to hold the 1916 referendum; Bertha Walker, Solidarity Forever! (Melbourne: The National Press, 1972), 106. Faced by a divided Party, Hughes thought the ‘Caucus could be “disciplined” later’, when ‘he would have the moral and political authority of a successful referendum vote’; John Faulkner, ‘Splits: Consequences and Lessons’, in True Believers: The Story of the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party, John Faulkner and Stuart Macintyre, eds. (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2001), 205. 142 Reprinted in Holloway, The Australian Victory over Conscription in 1916–17, 8. 143 Brian Fitzpatrick, A Short History of the Australian Labor Movement, New edition (Melbourne: Rawson’s Bookshop, 1944), 133. 144 Brian Fitzpatrick, The Australian People 1788–1945 (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1946), 253. ‘What did conscription really involve?’ asks Robson. ‘No one knew’; The First A.I.F., 87. 145 Smith, The Conscription Plebiscites in Australia, p. 27.

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said Brian Fitzpatrick, ‘these transparent devices defeated their object’.146 For this to have happened a sufficient number of voters would have had to have read the propositions, suspected they were ‘transparent devices’, and changed their vote – an unlikely sequence of events. Five weeks out from the first referendum, said Manning Clark, ‘the rowdies on both sides changed the terms of the debate’, though from what to what he didn’t say.147 According to Robson, ‘the question of conscription turned on the nature of the threat to Australia and the Empire’; for those who thought that ‘only the government knew how serious the danger was’, if the government urged conscription ‘then conscription there should be’.148 According to the Mercury the question voters needed to answer was not whether conscription was necessary, but whether the country was ‘going to allow maniacs, murderers, forgers, fire raisers, bomb-throwers and rowdies to govern the country’.149 ‘For both sides’, says Joan Beaumont, ‘conscription became the vehicle for giving voice to much wider concerns and anxieties which reflected a deep social polarisation’.150 How voters themselves under­ stood the propositions that were put to them must remain, as with almost every referendum, a matter of conjecture.151 But that they were simply passing judgment on what was on their ballot papers is less certain than the import of the propositions on which they were asked to vote. Why Australians voted ‘No’, Hartley Grattan concluded, ‘must remain a mystery … or at least a point subject to a variety of explanations’.152 What this chapter argues is that the defeat of the referendums cannot be simply attributed to the rural vote, a vote that favoured the ‘No’ side in three States in 1916 and four in 1917; that those of German background weren’t responsible for the ‘No’ vote prevailing in South Australia; and that the vote of those who had migrated from England can’t explain the size of the ‘Yes’ vote 146 See Brian Fitzpatrick, The Commonwealth of Australia: A Picture of the Community, 1901–1955 (Melbourne: F.W. Cheshire, 1956), pp. 263, 265. 147 Clark, A History of Australia, 35. 148 L.L. Robson, Australia and the Great War (South Melbourne: Macmillan of Australia, 1969), 15. 149 Quoted in Lake, A Divided Society, 80. 150 Beaumont, ‘The Politics of a Divided Society’, 46. 151 The one, eye-opening, partial exception is the 1967 referendum; Murray Goot and Tim Rowse, Divided Nation? Indigenous Affairs and the Imagined Public (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2007), 58–59. 152 C. Hartley Grattan, The Southwest Pacific Since 1900: A Modern History (Ann Arbor: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 57.

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Chapter Five

in Western Australia. Moreover, while the ‘No’ vote in 1916 was lower than Labor’s 1914 Senate vote, it was sufficient. Most explanations of the referendum results are shot-through with eco­logi­ cal reasoning, arguing from what is known about the characteristics of elec­tor­ ates to conclusions about the characteristics of voters within these electorates. About the behaviour of individuals – farmers, Labor and non-Labor voters, Catholics and Protestants – rather than the behaviour of electoral divisions or sub-divisions the aggregate data are of little help. The frustration some historians have expressed about the absence of public opinion polls at the time of the referendums implies some recognition of this problem.153 Historians, nonetheless, are not ham-strung. The close study of voting returns within subdivisions combined with other evidence of a quantitative or qualitative kind has been put to good use in the past and should be pursued in the future.154 ‘Why had the electorate proved Hughes so wrong in his estimate of it?’ Inglis asked, nearly fifty years ago. The fact that the referendum was so widely expected to pass, and didn’t, is one reason why historians have focused on explaining the ‘No’ vote rather than the ‘Yes’ vote; ‘[i]t was as if in a secret ballot Australians would say “No”’, thought one historian, ‘but publicly they would mouth the opposite’.155 Another reason may have to do with the view among historians that the defeat of the referendum was no bad thing. A concern with the ‘No’ vote may also reflect the fact that history generally focuses on the winners. Most commonly neglected in attempts to explain the ‘No’ vote are the numbers who turned out – much higher in the 1916 referendum than in the 1914 election. Blackburn described the ‘mass of 153 See, for example, D.J. Murphy, ‘Religion, Race and Conscription in World War I’, Australian Journal of Politics and History 20 no. 2 (1974): 156; Alcock, ‘Reasons for the Rejection of Conscription 1916–17’: 15. 154 See, in particular: Metherell, ‘The Conscription Referenda, October 1916 and December 1917’; Stock, ‘South Australia’s “German” Vote in World War I’: 255–60, and ‘Farmers and the Rural Vote in South Australia in World War’: 401–2; Lake, A Divided Society, 80–81; Ina Bertrand, ‘The Victorian Country Vote in the Conscription Referendum of 1916 and 1917: The Case of the Wannon Electorate’, Labour History no. 26 (1974): 19–31; Oliver, War and Peace in Western Australia, 106, 122–24; McQuilton, Rural Australia and the Great War, 68–72; Anne BeggsSunter, ‘Ballarat’s Crusading Evening Echo: Fighting Militarism in World War I’, in Fighting Against War: Peace Activism in the Twentieth Cen­tury, Phillip Deery and Julie Kimber, eds. (Melbourne, Leftbank Press, 2015), 113. It is notable that most of these authors are women. For other observations about the gendered division of labour in approaches to the study of war in Australia, see Joan Beaumont, ‘The State of Australian War History’, Australian Historical Studies 34 no. 121 (2003): 166–67. 155 Bomford, That Dangerous and Persuasive Woman, 186.

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electors’ who voted as ‘the great unattached’.156 A disproportionate number of ‘the great unattached’ are likely to have been new voters. Debates about the proportions of Labor voters that must have voted ‘Yes’ in 1916, or Liberals that must have voted ‘No’, ignore this entirely. ‘Some historians have tried to explain the result’, Inglis went on to observe, ‘but large puzzles remain’.157 Some of these puzzles may yet be solved.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to Cam Binger and Tom Wynter for research assistance, to Ian Watson for discussions about the ecological fallacy, and to Hall Greenland and Helen Irving for spotting errors in the penultimate draft. Research for this chapter was supported by the Australian Research Council DP0987839.

156 Blackburn, The Conscription Referendum of 1916, 8. 157 Inglis, ‘Conscription in Peace and War, 1911–1945’, 39.

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Part 3 Comparisons

Cha pte r Si x

W H Y WA S I T E A S I ER T O I N T ROD UCE A N D I M PL E M E N T C ONS CR I P T ION I N S OM E E NGL I SH-SPE A K I NG C OU N T R I E S T H A N I N O T H ER S? John Connor

First World War debates on the introduction of conscription were a peculiarly English-speaking phenomenon. The majority of the 65 million men who fought in the Great War were conscripts.1 All the non-Englishspeaking major and minor combatant states entered the conflict with conscript armies. Only English-speaking states joined the war with entirely volunteer forces. During the Great War, most English-speaking countries and self-governing Dominions would introduce conscription, with varying degrees of opposition to its imposition and implementation. Britain – but not Ireland – brought in military compulsion in January 1916, New Zealand in June 1916, the United States in May 1917, Canada in July 1917 (with the induction of conscripts commencing in January 1918 following the federal election in December 1917) and Newfoundland in April 1918. There was no attempt in South Africa to conscript Afrikaner-speaking or Englishspeaking Whites as soldiers. In Australia, attempts to bring in conscription for overseas military service by referendum in October 1916 and December 1917 failed on both occasions. The United Kingdom Government extended conscription to Ireland in April 1918, but its implementation was prevented by popular protest. 1

Ian F.W. Beckett, The Great War (2nd ed. Harlow: Pearson, 2007), 282.

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Chapter Six

The question of why it was easier to introduce conscription in some English-speaking countries than it others does not lend itself to a simple answer. However, three factors appear significant. The first is that the closer the conscription debate was to the country entering the war, the more likely the measure was to be introduced. The second was that bringing in compulsion by passing legislation was more likely to succeed than the attempts in Australia, where the majority of voters were required to approve conscription before parliament would pass the bill. Third, a significant part of the explanation for the failure to introduce conscription in Australia is that the labour movement – both political and industrial – was more power­ ful in Australia than it was in the other English-speaking countries. In 1916 Labor Prime Minister William Morris Hughes could not get conscription legislation through the Senate because Labor Senators were opposed to the policy. It is true that anti-conscriptionists in Australia came from a range of backgrounds – from pacifists to farmers – but it was the labour movement that formed the core of the successful ‘no’ case in both referendums. As this chapter will demonstrate, the Great War English-speaking conscription debates should be seen in as what Jenny Macleod, Senior Lecturer in Twentieth Century History at the University of Hull, has described as a ‘conversation on conscription’ in which the debate in one English-speaking country was informed by events in other parts of the Anglophone world.2 Before beginning examination of the conscription debates in the United States, the United Kingdom and the Dominions, it is important to remember that, during the First World War, formal and informal conscription existed, or was contemplated, in other parts of the British Empire. In June 1917 the Legislative Council in the colony of Jamaica introduced compulsory military service for all eligible Jamaican males, 98 per cent of whom were categorised in the 1911 census as ‘Coloured’, ‘Black’ or ‘East Indian’. Conscripts were inducted and trained, but the wartime Caribbean shipping shortage meant that they could not be transported to Europe. In May 1918 all these men were discharged and sent home.3 In East Africa, where British and German colonial forces fought each other from 3 November 1914 until 23 November 1918 – after the war had ended in Europe – the Kenyan colonial government ordered the mass conscription in July and August 1917 of African males 2 3

Conversation Dr Jenny Macleod with author, 23 March 2015. Charles Lucas, ‘Jamaica’, in The Empire at War, Vol. II, ed., Charles Lucas (London: Oxford University Press, 1923), 349–50; W.H. Mercer, The Colonial Office List for 1914 (London: Waterlow & Sons, 1914), 218; Beckett, Great War, p. 95.

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aged eighteen to thirty to serve as carriers and labourers in support of the military campaign.4 The British Government considered imposing military compulsion in its West African colonies in early 1917. This was for two reasons. The first was because it was estimated that West African conscription would provide 70,000 extra troops for the ongoing East African campaign. The second was that it would improve relations with the French Government, as it would prevent men in French West African colonies, where there had been conscription since 1912, fleeing across the border into British colonies to avoid military service. In 1916, when the French Government responded to the high number of casualties suffered at the Battle of Verdun by increasing the intake of West African conscripts, an estimated 150,000 people fled across the border into Liberia and the British colonies. The majority of the British West African colonial governors, however, feared conscription would cause dissent and rebellion. The British Government proposal was abandoned.5 The South African Native Labour Corps, which sent 21,000 African labourers to France to carry out vital military tasks such as road construction and unloading supplies at the Channel ports, was ostensibly a volunteer force. Two-thirds of the Labour Corps, however, came from one sparsely populated district in Northern Transvaal. In July 1917, Lord Buxton, the South African Governor-General, admitted to Sir Walter Long, the British Colonial Secretary, that the ‘natives’ in this region were ‘somewhat more under the control of their Chiefs, and the Chiefs there are more under the control of the Government than elsewhere’, adding, perhaps unconvincingly, ‘I do not think … there has been anything approaching compulsion in the matter’. More recently, South African historian Bill Nasson has argued that the coercive actions by White local magistrates in Northern Transvaal and elsewhere meant recruiting for the Labour Corps was ‘conscription in all but name’.6 4 Beckett, Great War, 95. 5 Memo Colonel R.A. Haywood, ‘Recruiting in West Africa’, 2 May 1917, The National Archives (TNA), London, CO 445/42; memo C.H. Harper, Assistant Colonial Secretary, Gold Coast, 31 May 1917, TNA, CO 445/39; Beckett, Great War, 96–7; Akinjide Osuntokun, Nigeria in the First World War (London: Longman, 1979), 247–8. 6 Letter Lord Buxton, South African Governor-General, to Sir Walter Long, UK Colonial Secretary, 28 July 1917, Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre (WSHC) Chippenham, 947/602; Bill Nasson, Springboks on the Somme: South Africa in the Great War 1914–1918 (Johannesburg: Penguin, 2007), 161–6.

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Chapter Six

Britain: 1916 In August 1914, the British Army consisted of 247,432 Regular full-time soldiers and 733,514 Territorial part-time soldiers. By November 1918, 5.7 million men had served in the British Army. During the course of the war, 2.4 million men volunteered – including about 200,000 Irishmen – and 2.5 million men were conscripted. Conscription was introduced in Britain in January 1916 for single men and childless widows aged 18 to 41 years. Ireland was excluded from conscription because the Nationalist majority would have opposed conscription unless it was accompanied by some form of Irish Home Rule. In June 1916 conscription was expanded to all men in Britain in this age range, and in April 1918 – a month after the German spring offensive broke through the British lines in Northern France – the liability for military service was extended to 50 year-olds, with provision to broaden compulsion to 56 year-olds and to Ireland.7 The introduction of conscription in Britain was due to two main factors: the establishment of the Coalition government on 15 May 1915, and the decline of voluntary enlistment during this year. As well, the British had been unable to gain a substantial victory over the Central Powers during 1915, with defeats in France at Neuve Chapelle in March, Aubers Ridge in May and Loos in September, and the disastrous campaign against the Ottoman Empire at the Dardanelles commencing with the naval attempt to capture the Narrows in February and March, the initial troop landings in April and the failed major offensive in August.8 Adrian Gregory argues that British public opinion towards the war was galvanised in the four weeks leading up to 15 May. This may have played a role in the creation of the Coalition government. In the last two weeks of April and the first two weeks of May, the British reacted to the German Army’s use of poison gas at the Second Battle of Ypres on 22 April, Zeppelin air raids from 29 April on coastal towns such as Ipswich, Southend, Dover and Ramsgate, the U-Boat sinking of the Lusitania off Cork on 7 May, and the release of the Bryce Report on German atrocities in Belgium on 12 May. 7 Beckett, Great War, 55–6, 289, 294; John Horne, ‘Our war, our history’ and Philip Orr, ‘200,000 Volunteer Soldiers’, ed., John Horne, Our War: Ireland and the Great War (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2008), 11, 63–77; S.J. Connolly, Oxford Companion to Irish History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 246; R.J.Q. Adams & Philip P. Poirier, The Conscription Controversy in Great Britain, 1900–18 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987), 72, 140, 168, 231. 8 Jenny Macleod, Gallipoli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Robin Prior, Gallipoli: The End of the Myth (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2009).

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For the first time since the outbreak of war there were a large number of attacks on German people and property – dubbed ‘Lusitania riots’ – across Britain and across the British Empire.9 The new Coalition cabinet consisted of twenty-two members: twelve Liberals, eight Unionists (Conservatives), Arthur Henderson from the Labour Party, and Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, who was defined as non-political. R.J.Q. Adams and Philip P. Poirier argue in their classic account of the politics of British conscription in the Great War that Prime Minister Herbert Asquith would have preferred to continue his Liberal administration, but he realised that unless he agreed to a coalition there might be a ‘a political explosion’ that would destroy his government.10 Before 1914, calls for the introduction of compulsory military training in the United Kingdom had mostly come from the conservative side of politics. By the middle of 1915, the majority of Unionist MPs supported conscription. Conversely, most Liberal MPs at this time ‘remained profoundly suspicious’ of military compulsion. Asquith had no philosophical objection to military compulsion, but he would not contemplate instituting it without the support of his party and the public. A few Liberals did support conscription. David Lloyd George was the most significant of these. Having asserted in February that the Great War was an ‘engineers’ war’, he argued that a compulsory system would enable skilled munitions workers to be retained in the factories, where they could make a greater contribution to the war effort than if they volunteered for the Army. The Unionist leader, Andrew Bonar Law, came to support conscription for the same reasons as Lloyd George.11 In August 1915, a majority of the cross-party War Policy Committee came down in support of conscription. Labourite Arthur Henderson opposed, stating that introducing the measure would result in ‘a divided Cabinet, a divided Parliament, and a divided nation’, and his views were backed by a Trades Union Congress meeting in Bristol. In October, Kitchener told Cabinet that the Army would require 35,000 recruits per week until the end of 1916: current volunteering had declined to roughly half that amount. Asquith decided to bring in conscription at the beginning of 1916, as Adams and Poirier put it, ‘in order to ensure a sufficient number of soldiers and to 9 10 11

Adams & Poirier, Conscription Controversy, 80, 83; Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 46; Nasson, Springboks on the Somme, 29; Manchester Guardian, 13 May 1915. Adams & Poirier, Conscription Controversy, 186, 193; R.J.Q. Adams, Bonar Law, (London: John Murray, 1999), 184–6. Adams & Poirier, Conscription Controversy, 73, 203–5.

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Chapter Six

reinforce his hold on the premiership’. The Home Secretary, Sir John Simon, was the only Liberal minister to resign in opposition to conscription. By the end of 1916, Asquith would be replaced by Lloyd George as prime minister.12 The implementation of conscription in Britain was initially opposed by the labour movement, though it did not oppose the draft once it was instituted, as well as by others who opposed compulsion on libertarian, moral or religious grounds. About 16,500 British men claimed exemption from conscription as Conscientious Objectors.13 Overall, most British people seem to have accepted military compulsion. The United Kingdom Government used conscription to expand and sustain the British Army at a scale comparable to the Continental conscript armies of Germany and France. An army of this size was necessary to defeat the German Army and liberate northern France and Belgium from German occupation. At its greatest extent in 1917, the British Army had 3.9 million men in uniform, with 1.5 million soldiers in 56 divisions on the Western Front – the bloodiest and most important theatre of the Great War.14 During 1917, when the French Army was paralysed with mutiny, the Russian Army dissolved in revolution, and the Italian Army was demoralised by the devastating defeat at Caporetto, it was the British Army that continued to take the fight to the German Army on the Western Front at Messines, Passchendaele and Cambrai. In 1918, the British Army would play the main role in stopping the German March offensive, and would instigate the ‘Hundred Days’ offensive that commenced with the Battle of Amiens on 8 August and concluded with the Armistice on 11 November in 1918.15

New Zealand: 1916 New Zealand in 1914 had a part-time Territorial Force for local defence consisting of volunteers and males aged 14 to 20 undergoing compulsory military training. With the outbreak of war, the New Zealand Expeditionary Force (NZEF) was established as a volunteer force for overseas service. In June 1916, the New Zealand Parliament passed legislation introducing 12 13

Adams & Poirier, Conscription Controversy, 122, 205–7. Robin Archer, ‘Stopping War and Stopping Conscription: Australian Labour’s Response to World War I in Comparative Perspective’, Labour History 106 (2014): 54–5; Gregory, Last Great War, 110; Beckett, Great War, 295. 14 Beckett, Great War, 218. 15 Gary Sheffield, Forgotten Victory. The First World War: Myths and Realities (London: Headline Book Publishing, 2001); Peter Hart, 1918: A Very British Victory (London: Wiedenfield & Nicolson, 2008).

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conscription. New Zealand, perhaps more than any other Dominion at this time, felt a close cultural proximity in Britain. It is fair to say that the main reason Wellington brought in military compulsion in June was because London had done so at the beginning of the year. William Massey, New Zealand’s wartime prime minister, stated ‘if it were possible for the point of view of New Zealand and the point of view of the Empire as a whole to come into conflict, I would go for the Empire at once’. According to the New Zealand historian Ian McGibbon, most New Zealanders supported the introduction of conscription, and opposition was ‘largely confined to militant Labour, some Maori, and tiny groups of pacifists’.16 New Zealand, however, did not follow Britain’s lead and implement conscription as a means to greatly expand the size of the NZEF. Instead, reflecting New Zealand’s small population and the influence of the ideals of the United States Progressive movement, conscription was seen as a method to efficiently sustain the existing New Zealand infantry division of three brigades (temporarily supplemented by a fourth infantry brigade that existed from March 1916 to February 1917) on the Western Front. During the First World War, almost 70,000 men volunteered for the NZEF, but only 32,270 men were conscripted.17 The New Zealand system allocated each of the country’s four military districts a recruiting quota, and men were conscripted only if insufficient volunteers had come forward to fill the quota. The male population aged from twenty to forty-six was divided into two divisions: the First Division consisted of unmarried and recently married men, the Second Division consisted of all other males in this age group. The first ballot for conscription was not held until 16 November 1916. Initially conscripts were taken only from the First Division. From October 1917 onwards, Second Division married men without children, and then men with one or two children were included, but few of these married conscripts had left New Zealand before the war ended.18

16 17

18

Ian McGibbon (ed.) The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Military History (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 2000), 110, 118, 313. John Crawford, ‘“New Zealand is Being Bled to Death”: The Formation, Operations and Disbandment of the Fourth Brigade’, eds, John Crawford & Ian McGibbon, New Zealand’s Great War: New Zealand, the Allies and the First World War (Auckland: Exisle Publishing, 2007), 250–65. McGibbon (ed.) Oxford Companion to New Zealand Military History, 118; John E. Martin, ‘Blueprint for the Future? “National Efficiency” and the First World War’, eds, Crawford & McGibbon, New Zealand’s Great War, 519–20.

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James Allen, the New Zealand Defence Minister who served as Acting Prime Minister for much of the second half of the war while Prime Minister William Massey was in London attending the 1917 and 1918 Imperial Conferences, used Progressive ideas to create Military Service Boards and a National Efficiency Board. Military Service Boards were empowered to exempt individuals in certain professions, such as farming, who would be more useful continuing in their existing profession than being conscripted into the NZEF. However, the Progressive ideal of efficiency was outweighed by the pro-conscriptionist fervour of board members who rejected most exemption appeals. Allen granted the National Efficiency Board (NEB), established in March 1917, the power to prevent Military Service Boards conscripting ‘the last male worker of a farm’ without the NEB’s approval on the grounds that ‘a man working for himself or his family on his own holding was probably of more benefit to the state than he would in camp or in the firing-line’.19 New Zealand conscription initially applied only to Pakeha, and not to Maori. This was because at this time Maori iwi (tribes), depending on which side they had fought during the New Zealand Wars of the 1860s, were either loyal to the Crown, like Te Arawa, or hostile to the Crown, like Waikato. If conscription had been applied to Maori in 1916, loyal Maori would have accepted conscription, but Waikato would have refused to submit to compulsion. The New Zealand Government realised that conscripting Maori would therefore lead to pro-British Maori joining the NZEF and possibly being killed, with the result that the postwar Maori leadership would be dominated by Waikato who had not served. It was for this reason that the volunteer Maori contingent, once the New Zealand Division reached the intense and lethal warfare of the Western Front, was converted from infantry to a pioneer battalion (an unskilled engineering unit) so it would have, as New Zealand historian Ashley Gould puts it, ‘a less casualty-prone non-combat role’.20 The Union of South Africa had a comparable situation to New Zealand, but on a larger scale. South Africa was a White-dominated society, but the majority of the ruling White population was Afrikaner, most of whom 19

20

McGibbon (ed.) Oxford Companion to New Zealand Military History, 118; letter James Allen, New Zealand Defence Minister to William Massey, New Zealand Prime Minister, 17 March 1917, Archives New Zealand/Te Rua Mahara o te Kāwantanga (ANZ), Wellington, Allen Papers, 1/9; ‘National Efficiency Board (Report of )’, 1917, 4, 9, New Zealand Parliamentary Paper H–43, ANZ, NEB1, 22/1206. McGibbon (ed.) Oxford Companion to New Zealand Military History, 297.

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viewed their membership of the British Empire since 1902 with ambivalence, and some of whom had rebelled against the Union Government in 1914. Buxton, the South Africa Governor-General, privately commented in February 1917: it is just as well that too large a number of British and of “loyal Dutch” should not be out of the country during the war … The greater the numbers therefore who go overseas, and meet with casualties or do not return, the worse in the end will be the relative population and electoral position of the British here.21

In June 1917, the New Zealand Government, following requests from the Maori Recruitment Committee, consisting of iwi who had provided the most volunteers, extended conscription to Maori. As Gould points out, however, Maori conscription ‘was, in reality, only intended to be enforced against Waikato’. In June 1918, police, acting on the orders of Acting Prime Minister James Allen, arrested about 100 Waikato men for refusing to submit to conscription, but no Maori conscripts had left New Zealand before the war ended.22

Australia: 1916 Like New Zealand, Australia in 1914 had a part-time militia for local defence consisting of volunteers and males aged 12 to 25 undergoing compulsory military training. In August 1914, the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) was established as a volunteer force: 416,809 men enlisted during the war, of whom 333,725 served overseas. Australia has a unique Great War experience of conscription for two reasons. First, Australia was the only Dominion where the government made a concerted attempt to introduce conscription and failed to do so. Second, Australia’s government made no attempt to introduce conscription though legislation. Instead, Prime Minister Billy Hughes twice tried to bring in conscription by referendum on 28 October 1916 and 20 December 1917. The nature of the 1916 and 1917 conscriptions campaigns and the type of conscription to be implemented are sufficiently different that the two votes will be considered separately at the appropriate time in the sequence of English-speaking conscription debates. 21 22

Letter Buxton to Long, 2 February 1917, WSHC, 947/601. McGibbon (ed.) Oxford Companion to New Zealand Military History, 297–8; letter Allen to Massey, 11 June 1918, ANZ, Allen Papers, 1/9.

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Chapter Six

When the First World War began, the Australian Labor Party held state government in New South Wales, Tasmania and Western Australia. Between August 1914 and May 1915, Labor won the Federal election in September 1914, kept office in the Western Australian election in October, and gained power in both South Australia in March and Queensland in May. With the exception of Victoria, where the Liberals had retained government in the November 1914 election, Labor dominated state and federal politics.23 Internal tensions existed within the political and industrial wings of the Australian labour movement before the outbreak of the First World War, but they were exacerbated by the conflict. The far left of the Australian labour movement opposed the war and called for international workingclass solidarity, though the mainstream labour movement supported the war. The main initial effect of the Great War was ‘a major negative shock for the Australian economy’. Food prices rose for a variety of reasons including the El Niño drought of 1911 to 1916, less ships on the Australian route, and deliberate price manipulation. When the Australian conscription debate began in 1915, the regular refrain of the labour movement was that there should be no conscription of men unless there was conscription of wealth.24 Billy Hughes, who, following the retirement of Andrew Fisher, had become Australian prime minister at the end of 1915, departed for the United Kingdom for discussions on political, military and economic issues. On his return to Australia – and while Australian soldiers were fighting at Pozières and Mouquet Farm as part of the Battle of the Somme – Hughes called on Federal Caucus on 24 August 1916 to introduce overseas compulsory military service (The Australian Defence Act allowed compulsory military service within Australia).25 Hughes could not introduce conscription, as had been done in Britain and New Zealand, by passing a bill through Parliament. This was because the majority of senators were Labor anti-conscriptionists who would vote down the bill. This left Hughes with three other options to introduce con­ scription. The first was to use the wide powers of the War Precautions Act, 23 24

25

John Connor, Peter Stanley & Peter Yule, The War at Home, ed., Jeffrey Grey, The Centenary History of Australia and the Great War (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2015) Vol. 4, 94–5. Connor, Stanley & Yule, War at Home, 75, 91, 103; Joëlle L. Gergis & Anthony M. Fowler, ‘A history of ENSO events since A.D. 1525: implications for future climate change’, Climatic Change, 29 (2009), 368; J.A. Salter, Allied Shipping Control: An Experiment in International Administration (London: Clarendon Press, 1921) 12–13, 39, 49–50, 92. Connor, Stanley & Yule, War at Home, 106.

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but the Senate could disallow such regulations and they may also have been struck down as unconstitutional by the High Court. The second was to twice send the bill to the Senate and use its rejection as the trigger for a doubledissolution. Hughes rejected this because of the time it would take, and because it would also have placed him in the curious position of calling a double-dissolution election against members of his own party. The third was to call a referendum, in the hope that gaining a majority of voters would give Hughes the mandate to have the bill passed.26 The 1916 referendum, had it been carried, would have introduced a con­scription system on British lines where the army would be enlarged. The Defence Minister, Senator George Pearce, publicly stated during the referendum campaign that he had no intention to create new units. However, General Sir William Birdwood, the General Officer Commanding of the AIF, wrote privately that if conscription was passed, the AIF would expand from five to six divisions.27 The referendum result on 28 October was extremely narrow: the margin of victory opposing conscription was 72,476 out of a total of 2,247,590 votes. What Robin Archer has described as the ‘precocious strength of the Australian labour movement’s political organisation’ formed the basis for the success of the ‘no’ campaign. Anticonscriptionist Labor federal and state parliamentarians also played an important role because they had railway travel passes that provided them with free travel from town to town to speak at ‘No’ campaign meetings.28 On 14 November 1916, the sixty-four members of the Federal Labor Caucus assembled for the first time since the referendum. When it became clear that a no-confidence motion against Hughes would be carried, he led a walk-out of twenty-three MPs and Senators. Early in the new year Hughes would negotiate a coalition with the Liberals, form the Nationalist Party and remain prime minister. New Zealand Defence Minister James Allen’s assessment of the Australian attempt to introduce conscription by referendum was to tell Prime Minister William Massey, who had implemented New Zealand conscription by legislation: ‘Thank goodness we have avoided that blunder!’29 26 27 28 29

Connor, Stanley & Yule, War at Home, 107. John Connor, Anzac and Empire: George Foster Pearce and the Foundations of Australian Defence (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 101–3. Archer, ‘Stopping War and Stopping Conscription’, 66; Michael Hogan,ed., The First New South Wales Labor Government 1910–1916. Two Memoirs: William Holman and John Osborne (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2005), 243–4. Connor, Stanley & Yule, War at Home, 115; letter Allen to Massey, 29 October 1916, ANZ, Allen Papers, 9/9a.

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United States: 1917 The United States had remained neutral in 1914 when Europe went to war. When Germany first commenced unrestricted submarine warfare in 1915 – meaning U-Boats would attack neutral shipping, including US merchant ships, sailing to the United Kingdom – President Woodrow Wilson’s protests led the German Government to suspend their campaign. In the Presidential campaign of November 1916, Wilson was narrowly re-elected on the slogan ‘He Kept Us Out of War’. However, while the United States was still neutral, it was more sympathetic to the Allies than to Germany. The British and French were allowed to raise billions of dollars on the American bond market, and able to purchase large amounts of artillery ammunition and other war materiel.30 On 31 January 1917, the German Government announced the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare. This was a strategy intended to win the war by sinking ships and preventing food and other vital items reaching the United Kingdom and forcing the British to surrender. Neutral American ships were once more in danger: in mid-March U-Boats sank three US merchant ships in three days with most of the crews drowned. On 20 March, two days after the third of these U-Boat attacks, Wilson’s Cabinet unanimously agreed on the necessity of going to war with Germany. On 2 April, the President went to Capitol Hill and requested the Congress to vote for a declaration of war. The Senate voted 82 for war, 6 against; the House of Representatives voted 373 for, 50 against. War was declared on 6 April.31 When America joined the First World War, the United States Army consisted of 127,588 full-time Regular soldiers and 181,620 part-time National Guardsmen. The scale of warfare on the Western Front meant that the United States would need to form a mass army in order to contribute to the defeat of Germany. Wilson and his War Secretary, Newton D. Baker, had to decide whether this mass army should be formed of volunteers, conscripts or a combination of both.32 30

Lawrence Sondhaus, World War One: The Global Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 310–11. 31 Sondhaus, World War One, 312; John Whiteclay Chambers II, To Raise an Army: The Draft comes to Modern America (New York: Free Press, 1987), 132. 32 Jennifer Keene, ‘Sustaining the Will to Fight: The American Army in World War I’, in Raise, Train and Sustain: Delivering Land Combat Power. The 2009 Chief of Army History Conference, eds Peter Dennis & Jeffrey Grey (Sydney: Australian Military History Publishing, 2010), 54; Chambers, To Raise an Army, 171.

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Wilson and Baker considered all three options in the eight weeks be­ tween the German resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare and the American declaration of war. On 28 March Wilson decided he would rely on a form of conscription to recruit the new army. One of the main reasons for this was to prevent former Republican President Theodore Roosevelt, a major political rival, from raising volunteer regiments separate from the US Army and taking them directly to France.33 Baker forwarded the draft conscription bill to Congress on 8 April. The Chairman of the House Military Affairs Committee, S. Hubert Dent of Alabama, countered with a proposal to form separate volunteer and conscript armies which would provide the option of sending volunteers overseas and retaining conscripts for home defence. On 18 April the House Military Affairs Committee voted 13 to 8 in favour of Dent’s draft bill. Indicating the diversity of views in Congress on conscription, that same day the Senate Military Affairs Committee voted 10 to 7 in favour of Wilson’s bill. In a prime example of the English-speaking ‘conscription conversation’, when the bill reached the floor of the Senate, nine of the Senators who spoke in opposition to the bill referred to the defeat of the Australian conscription referendum. In the end, Congress approved the introduction of conscription. On 28 April the House of Representatives voted against Dent’s bill, 279 to 98. The same day, the Senate voted to require the President to establish four volunteer divisions, though this was then amended to enable Wilson to form these units if he so chose (which he did not). On 17 May 1917, the House voted to approve the Selective Service Bill 397 to 24; the Senate supported it 81 to 8. The Selective Service Act became law on 19 May 1917.34 As in Britain, the United States implemented conscription in order to raise a mass army capable of defeating the Germans on the Western Front. By the time of the armistice on 11 November 1918, the United States had raised a force of over 4.4 million uniformed men serving in the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard. This included 2,810,296 conscript soldiers, constituting 72 per cent of the US Army, and 20 per cent of all eligible males liable for the draft.35 33 Chambers, To Raise an Army, 125–6, 130, 134, 136; Keene, ‘Sustaining the Will to Fight’, 54; Beckett, Great War, 288. 34 Chambers, To Raise an Army, 148, 160–61, 165, 168, 170–71; Robin Archer, ‘“Quite like ourselves”: Opposition to military compulsion during the Great War in the United States and Australia’, paper presented at the Australia-US Transnational and Comparative Labour History Conference, University of Sydney, 8–9 January 1915, 18–19. 35 Keene,‘Sustaining the Will to Fight’, 54.

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Chapter Six

Jennifer Keene points out that, unlike the imposition of conscription in 1863 for the Union Army in the Civil War, which resulted in rioting that stretched all the way from New York City to rural communities in the MidWest, the implementation of the Selective Service Act in 1917 ‘aroused little opposition within the United States’. This was for two reasons. The first was that conscription was introduced within six weeks of entering the conflict, while war enthusiasm was still high. The second was that selective service fitted within aspects of the prevailing Progressive ethos in the United States that believed that government, whether local or national, could be improved and made more efficient.36 Selective service was portrayed, as Keene suggests, as ‘a modern man­ agement technique designed to ensure that the nation mobilized in the most efficient way possible’. Twenty-four million men aged between 18 and 45 registered: 65 per cent of these received deferments or exemptions, and about 337,000 registered men became ‘draft dodgers’. Only 3 million men did not register. Deferments and exemptions were decided by 4647 local boards established across the nation. It was in these local boards, Keene writes, that ‘the actual process of conscription departed drama­ tically from the Progressive rhetoric used to sell it to the American people’. According to Keene, these draft boards ‘put the local professional elite firmly in control of deciding the fate of each community’s lower and working classes’. Decisions by local boards, for example, resulted in 36 per cent of eligible Blacks being conscripted, compared to 25 per cent of eligible Whites. 37

Canada: 1917 In August 1914, the Canadian military consisted of 3,110 full-time Permanent Force, including the Royal Canadian Regiment, and a much larger number of part-time militia. Unlike the Dominions of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, Canada had not introduced compulsory military training in the decade before the war. During the course of the war, 620,000 men – 37 per cent of whom were UK-born – volunteered to serve in the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF). Recruiting declined in early 1917. Soon after the Canadian Corps’ famous – but costly – capture of Vimy Ridge on 12 April, Conservative Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden became convinced of the need for conscription. 36 Chambers, To Raise an Army, 53–4; Keene, ‘Sustaining the Will to Fight’, 54. 37 Keene, ‘Sustaining the Will to Fight’, 55–6; Beckett, Great War, 289.

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The Canadian Parliament passed a bill introducing conscription for all male British Subjects aged 20 to 45 on 24 July 1917, but it was not until after Borden had gained an emphatic – but controversial – victory in the federal election of 17 December 1917 that the induction of conscripts commenced in January 1918. Canada called up 124,588 conscripts, but only 24,132 men had left Canada before the war ended. Of these, Canadian historian Tim Cook estimates only a few thousand reached the front line.38 The conscription campaign and the 1917 election created a division among Canadians between Francophone Quebec and the Anglophone provinces that would continue for many decades. As Granatstein and Oliver have written: ‘Ultimately, the bulk of social and political pressure in Quebec was not to enlist; in the other provinces, public pressure was precisely the opposite.’39 Canada – particularly Anglophone Canada – became a vital source of wartime supplies for the United Kingdom. By the time the Armistice was signed, Canada had produced more than two million dollars40 of war material for every day of the war. Within weeks of the outbreak of war in 1914, the British War Office had asked the Canadian Minister of Militia and Defence, Sam Hughes, to help place ammunition orders with United States manufacturers. Hughes did this, and also gained $170 million in Canadian contracts, mostly for Conservative Party cronies from his home province of Ontario. In 1915 there were 250 factories making munitions or other war production employing about 60,000 employees. When there were delays in fulfilling these orders – Sam Hughes would be forced to resign as minister in 1916 following a royal commission that uncovered corruption in the initial contracts – the British Government created the Imperial Munitions Board in November 1915, a more efficient organisation answering directly to London, though chaired by Canadian businessman James Flavelle. By 1917 Canada had 600 war factories employing 289,000 female and male workers. Between a quarter and a third of all artillery shells fired by the

38

39 40

James Wood, Militia Myths: Ideas of the Canadian Citizen Soldier, 1896–1921 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010); J.L. Granatstein & J.M. Hitsman, Broken Promises: A History of Conscription in Canada (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1978), 66, 68, 81, 86; J.L. Granatstein & Dean F. Oliver (eds), The Oxford Companion to Canadian Military History (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2011), 85, 123, 334, 384, 481; Tim Cook, Shock Troops: Canadians Fighting the Great War 1917–1918 (Toronto: Viking Canada, 2008), 504. Granatstein & Oliver (eds), Oxford Companion to Canadian Military History, 482. The Canadian dollar at this time had the same value as the United States dollar.

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Chapter Six

British Empire’s armies on the Western Front in 1917 had been made in Canada.41 Wheat from the Canadian prairies became a vital staple in the wartime British diet. In October 1917, Professor Oscar D. Skelton of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, pointed out how Canada’s industrial capacity, agricultural output and efficient shipping routes meant Canada could make a more significant economic contribution to the British war effort than the antipodean Dominions. He wrote that ‘neither [Australia nor New Zealand] has been able to develop war manufacturing industries on a scale even faintly approaching the Canadian’, and that ‘a farmer in Canada can be of very much greater service in the common cause than a farmer in Australia’.42 In contrast to Anglophone Canada, the war had little impact in Quebec. The province made up 37 per cent of the Canadian population during the First World War, but Québécois accounted for perhaps only five per cent of volunteers in the CEF. In June 1917, there were 14,100 Francophone Canadians serving overseas: only 8,200 were from Quebec, with the re­ mainder demonstrating the much higher enlistment rates from the much smaller French-speaking communities in the Maritime Provinces, Ontario and the Prairies. Unlike Anglophone Canada, which had attracted large numbers of migrants from Britain, and also from central and eastern Europe, Francophone Canadians had few ties to Europe: their ancestors mostly had been in Canada since the 1750s. Their rural background and devout Catholicism meant they had little in common with the secular French Republic and little interest in enlisting to liberate France. The Canadian Governor-General, the Duke of Devonshire, commented in June 1917 that in most Quebec newspapers, ‘either intentionally or unintentionally, the war is not brought home to the general public in the same way as elsewhere’.43 In May 1917 Conservative Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden invited the Liberal leader, Sir Wilfrid Laurier of Quebec, to join a ‘Union’ 41

Granatstein & Oliver (eds), Oxford Companion to Canadian Military History, 456; Michael Bliss, War Business as Usual: Canadian Munitions Production, 1914–1918’, in ed., N.F. Dreizinger, Mobilization for Total War: The Canadian, American and British Experience, 1914–1918, 1939–1945 (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1986), 49, 53. 42 [London] Canadian Gazette, 18 January 1917, 385; Granatstein & Hitsman, Broken Promises, 66. 43 Granatstein & Oliver (eds), Oxford Companion to Canadian Military History, 67–8, 352–3; Granatstein & Hitsman, Broken Promises, 73; Letter Duke of Devonshire, Canadian Governor-General, to Long, 20 June 1917, WSHC, 947/609.

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government in an attempt to avoid the country splitting on linguistic lines over conscription. Laurier was resolute in his opposition to conscription and refused to form a coalition. Borden then introduced his Military Service Bill to Parliament. On the final day of the parliamentary debate, Laurier looked for inspiration to the defeat of Australian conscription in October 1916. He called on Borden to hold a referendum on conscription, no doubt in the hope that if this method were employed, Canadians would reject the proposal in the same way that Australians had done.44 The Military Service Bill passed in July. Canada prepared itself for an election campaign ‘deliberately conducted’, as Granatstein and Hitsman put it, ‘on racist grounds’. Anglophone Liberal MPs deserted their party to join Borden’s Union government. Borden outrageously manipulated the electoral process in his favour with the introduction of the Military Voters Act and the War Time Elections Act. The first Act enfranchised all members of the CEF regardless of how long they had been resident in Canada. The soldiers’ ballot paper enabled them to vote for either ‘Government’ or ‘Opposition’ and write in their constituency. If no constituency was listed, the Government was free to count the vote in the electorate of its choice. The second Act gave the vote to Canadian women, but only if they were wives, sisters and daughters of soldiers, and, at the same time, disenfranchised naturalised British Subjects from enemy countries, conscientious objectors and members of pacifist churches such as the Mennonites. In the December election Laurier’s Liberals won all but three seats in Quebec, and 82 seats in total. Borden used the soldiers’ votes for ‘Govern­ ment’ which did not have a constituency inscribed to take 14 seats from the Liberals. The Union Government dominated the poll and won 153 seats.45

Australia: 1917 On 7 November 1917, Billy Hughes announced that a second conscription referendum would be held on 20 December. The referendum was defeated by a greater margin than the 1916 referendum. The second referendum campaign was more bitter than the first for three reasons. First, it occurred in the aftermath of the great strikes of August and September 1917. Second, the campaign was conducted in the midst of the ever-lengthening casualty lists from the Battle of Passchendaele. Third, the new Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, Daniel Mannix, was an outspoken opponent of conscription 44 45

Granatstein & Hitsman, Broken Promises, 68. Granatstein & Hitsman, Broken Promises, 67–8, 71–2.

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Chapter Six

and started framing his speeches in terms of class conflict in order to retain the loyalty of radicalising working-class Catholics.46 Hughes had told the Australian Governor-General, Sir Ronald MunroFerguson, on 13 October 1917 that conscription could not be introduced in Australia in the current political circumstances. It is not known what led Hughes to change his mind on such a substantial issue three weeks later. The best explanation is that the Prime Minister thought that war situation at the end of 1917 required drastic action. Recruiting for the AIF had declined sharply since August, the Australians had suffered 38,000 casualties in September and October at Passchendaele, the Italians had suffered a serious defeat at Caporetto on 24 October, and Russia had left the war.47 The Nationalists had gained an overwhelming victory in the Federal election on 5 May 1917 and held majorities in both the House of Rep­ resentatives and the Senate. This meant Hughes could have introduced conscription by legislation had he wished to, although he had promised not to do so during the election. One further reason he did not do so appears to be that his defence minister, Senator George Pearce advised him that if conscription was instituted by legislation, the first men would not reach the front until October 1918, but if conscription was brought in by referendum the time would be brought forward to June 1918.48 The system of conscription to be implemented in 1917 differed from that in 1916. Hughes proposed the introduction of limited conscription to sustain existing units based on the New Zealand system. The number of AIF recruits required each month was set at 7,000. If volunteers filled the recruiting quota, then no conscripts would be required. If less than 7,000 men enlisted, the remainder of the quota would be filled by conscripting single men aged between twenty and forty-four drawn from all parts of Australia.49 The Canadian national election on 17 December 1917 occurred three days before the second Australian conscription referendum. The Canadian Gazette, a London-based weekly for expatriate Canadians, anticipated that Sir Robert Borden’s electoral victory would have an effect on the Australian referendum: 46 47 48 49

Connor, Stanley & Yule, War at Home, 123–6; Val Noone, ‘Class Factors in the Radicalisation of Archbishop Daniel Mannix, 1913–17’, Labour History 106 (2014): 189–204 Connor, Stanley & Yule, War at Home, 122. Connor, Stanley & Yule, War at Home, 119, 121; Connor, Anzac and Empire, 108. L.F. Fitzhardinge, The Little Digger 1914–1952. William Morris Hughes: A Political Biography Vol. II (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1979), 284–5.

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T he Conscription Conflict and the Great War the result of the Canadian election is an inspiration for Australia in her approaching referendum on conscription … Now that Canada has spoken her mind so decisively we may expect good news also from Australia. There has always been a keen, healthy rivalry in sane and progressive Imperialism between the two great Dominions of the Empire.50

Newfoundland: 1918 Newfoundland, then a separate Dominion, followed Canada in enacting conscription in April 1918. Newfoundland, whose 1914 population totalled only 242,000, had provided one battalion, the Newfoundland Regiment, which served at Gallipoli and then on the Western Front. No Newfoundland conscript had departed for Europe before the war ended.51

Ireland: 1918 On 21 March 1918, Germany began its major offensive on the Western Front with the aim of defeating the British and French before the American Army arrived in strength in Europe. The Germans broke through the British lines in northern France and large numbers of British soldiers were killed or wounded or were captured. Two days after the start of the German offensive, the British War Cabinet considered proposals to increase the maximum age for conscription and to extend the Military Service Act to Ireland. It will be remembered that Ireland had retained voluntary enlistment when conscription was introduced in Britain in 1916. As the war continued, recruiting sharply declined in Ireland, even in the Unionist heartland of Belfast.52 The Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Field Marshal Sir John French, was present at the War Cabinet meeting and expressed his belief that the Irish would accept conscription. Lloyd George subsequently met Henry Duke, the Chief Secretary of Ireland, General Sir Bryan Mahon, the General Officer Commanding in Ireland, and Sir Joseph Byrne, the Chief of the Royal Irish Constabulary, who all warned of the difficulty, if not impossibility, of introducing conscription in Ireland.53 50 [London] Canadian Gazette, 20 December 1917, 269. 51 Granatstein & Oliver (eds), Oxford Companion to Canadian Military History, 289–90. 52 Recruiting in Belfast declined from the beginning of 1916 to the end of the war, with a one-off rise in October 1918 of 1330 volunteers due to a ‘special recruiting campaign’. Royal Irish Constabulary Belfast City Confidential Reports, January 1916 to October 1918, TNA, CO 904/99 to 904/107. 53 Adams & Poirier, Conscription Controversy, 229–32.

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Chapter Six

Sir Robert Borden in Canada responded to the German offensive by decid­ ing he needed to conscript more Canadians to send to Europe. He therefore reneged on the promise he had made during the 1917 election campaign that farmers’ sons would be exempt from conscription. This promise had been a significant factor in his electoral victory, as 117 of the 153 constituencies won by Borden’s Union were in rural areas. This policy shift caused disquiet in both Anglophone and Francophone Canada, with the possibility that all cate­ gories of exemptions from conscription would be denied. In Quebec these fears escalated into violence. Anti-conscription riots broke out in Quebec City from 28 March to 1 April 1918 – the Easter weekend. Rioters fired on English-speaking troops sent to Quebec to quash the revolt, and the soldiers fired back, resulting in four dead and 150 injured.54 A few days after the Quebec City riots, Sir Walter Long, the British Colonial Secretary and staunch Irish Unionist who wished to impose con­ scrip­tion on Ireland, initiated his own confidential ‘conscription conversation’ on 5 April. He sent a private telegram to the Canadian Governor-General, the Duke of Devonshire, asking for details on how the Canadian Military Service Act had been applied in Quebec. Long wrote: ‘Any experience you may have gained may be very valuable as a guide for dealing with analogous situation in Ireland.’ The Duke of Devonshire’s replied the following day that ‘the passive opposition of almost all the entire population’ had made it very difficult to enforce the legislation in the province, with the result that in three months only five thousand Québécois had been conscripted.55 The experience from Quebec, combined with the advice from the Irish experts, might have led Lloyd George to decide that the difficulties of im­pos­ ing conscription in Ireland outweighed the potential benefits, especially as the US Army was transporting thousands of largely willing conscripts across the Atlantic every month. Nonetheless, Lloyd George introduced the Military Service Amendment Bill to Parliament on 9 April 1918. After the Bill passed its third reading in the House of Commons on 16 April, Nationalist Ireland erupted in protest at the possibility of conscription. On 23 April, the Irish Trades Union Congress called a general strike. Sinn Féin led opposition to conscription, as did the Catholic hierarchy, who followed their congregations in order to lead them, as Archbishop Mannix had done six months earlier in 54 55

Granatstein & Oliver (eds), Oxford Companion to Canadian Military History, 123; Martin F. Auger, ‘On the Brink of Civil War: The Canadian Government and the Sup­pression of the 1918 Quebec Easter Riots’, Canadian Historical Review, 89, no. 4, (2008): 503–40. Telegrams Long to Devonshire, 5 April 1918, Devonshire to Long, 6 April 1918, WSHC, 947/610.

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Australia. The English Catholic magazine the Tablet, argued on 18 May that the Irish bishops’ intervention saved Ireland ‘from slaughter and ruin, and England from a miscalculated method of getting soldiers here. They did not rise to stop conscription, but to save their flocks and country.’56

Conclusion In Great Britain and the United States, conscription was introduced and implemented in 1916 and 1917 respectively to create mass armies capable of meeting and defeating the German Army on the Western Front. The self-governing British Dominions that introduced forms of conscription by legislation: New Zealand in 1916, Canada, amid much controversy, in 1917 and Newfoundland in 1918, did so in order to sustain, rather than expand, their existing expeditionary forces. In all three cases, the number of conscripts was much smaller than the number of volunteers. Only a few Canadian conscripts saw combat before the war ended. No Newfoundland conscripts crossed the Atlantic. In Australia, William Morris Hughes tried to introduce conscription by referendum in 1916, in reaction to the failure of the Somme offensive, and in 1917, in reaction to the failure of the Passchendaele offensive and the devastating Italian defeat at Caporetto. On both occasions the electorate voted against conscription. Following the initial success of the German offensive in March 1918, the United Kingdom Government extend­ed conscription to Ireland, but it was not implemented due to public op­position. Both advocates and opponents of conscription were aware of the debates within the British Empire and with the United States. Senators referred to the failure to introduce conscription in Australia in 1916 when they opposed the Selective Service Bill in Congress in 1917. Pro-conscriptionist Walter Long privately asked the Canadian GovernorGeneral in 1918 how compulsion was being implemented in Quebec for clues on how it could be applied in Ireland. The English-speaking conversation on conscription in the First World War involved both opponents and supporters of military compulsion and evolved in response to domestic conditions and the fluctuating fortunes of the war.

56

Adams & Poirier, Conscription Controversy, 232, 237; Michael Laffan, The Resurrection of Ireland: the Sinn Féin Party 1916–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 138–40; [London] Tablet, 18 May 1918.

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Cha pte r Se ve n

C ONS CR I P T ION I N T H E F I R S T WOR L D WA R Britain and Australia Ross McKibbin

What were the longer-term consequences of the debate over military con­ scrip­tion in Britain and Australia? In Britain conscription was introduced by legislation, and though some opposed it they were neither numerous nor powerful enough to resist it. In Australia conscription for overseas service was not introduced by legislation. Rather, the federal government attempted to secure it via two referendums, and failed after two campaigns that were deeply divisive at almost all levels of Australian life. In this respect, therefore, British and Australian experience was not comparable. Why this was so, given their political and cultural affinities, is an important question, particularly as in both countries large and powerful labour movements were central to the debates over conscription. I have suggested reasons why conscription was acceptable to the British; but also why such reasons did not favour conscription in Australia. As to the longer-term consequences of conscription it is difficult to distin­g uish those consequences a result of con­ scription and those a result of the war – of which conscription was simply one of many driving forces.

Britain In 1914 the British would have been surprised to learn that within eighteen months unmarried men and soon after married men would be conscripted

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T he Conscription Conflict and the Great War

for military service.1 That this was done by a Liberal or Liberal-dominated government − despite the historic anti-conscriptionism of the Liberal Party and its ally the Labour Party − would further have surprised them. But it became clear, even in the first few weeks of the war, that the way it was being fought made almost limitless the demand for men. Even Lord Kitchener,2 who long remained convinced that a volunteer army would suffice, came to the view that it would not. It was for this reason that H.H. Asquith, the Liberal Prime Minister, confessed that he, despite what his wife thought,3 was wholly ‘pragmatic’ in his view of conscription. In November 1915 he told the House of Commons he had ‘no abstract or a priori objection to any sort of compulsion in time of war’. His main concern was that when conscription did come, it came with public support.4 In the event, only one minister, Sir John Simon, resigned from the government when it became formally committed to compulsory military service in January 1916. There was, furthermore, a growing movement for conscription based upon the pre-war military leagues, which had significant support within the middle classes and the Conservative Party. Amongst the working class generally there was also a strong ‘patriotic’ tradition, though not necessarily Conservative, sympathetic to conscription and represented within the trade unions by ‘super-patriots’ like C.B. Stanton, Will Thorne, Havelock Wilson and Ben Tillett. The war, unlike the Boer War, was almost universally held to be morally right and strategically justified. It had to be fought. Since this was so, the state had a right, it was argued, to compel all to serve. From this argument emerged the doctrine of ‘fairness’, the idea that everyone, not only some, should participate in a just war. The Rev. Andrew Clark, observing opinion in the rural parish in Essex of which he was vicar, noted that ‘the country lads, say, and to my mind justly, “If so many are needed by the country, let the country say all must go”’.5 In 1915, asked whether he would canvass recruits under the Derby scheme, he said ‘frankly that I would not – because (a) lads’ “backs have been put up” by being pestered by women canvassers and by 1 2 3

4 5

The first Military Service Act was introduced in January 1916; the second in May 1916. Kitchener had been appointed Secretary of State for War at the outbreak of war. Michael and Eleanor Brock,eds, Margot Asquith’s Great War Diary: The View from Downing Street (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014), 180. ‘I told [Edwin Montagu] that I had never discussed Conscription in my life with Henry [Asquith], but I was passionately against it, and knew he was’. John Turner, British Politics and the Great War (London: Yale University Press, 2008), 70–71. Andrew Clark, Echoes of the Great War (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 39 (22 Dec. 1914).

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Chapter Seven

their friends being dismissed by their employers; (b) it is quite contrary to my own opinions which are (i) that enough men have been taken off field work leaving idle youths loafing about town; and (ii) that at the beginning of the war, Government ought to have adopted some form of equable compulsory service’.6 Once it was thought an inescapable duty to fight the war the case for ‘fairness’, and so for conscription, seemed almost unanswerable to anyone other than a conscientious objector. There was, in addition, a eugenic argument. In Australia eugenics was based upon race and the survival of the race. But in Britain eugenic theory was primarily based upon class and had different implications. Why was the army disproportionately middle and upper middle class? Because members of the middle class were more likely than members of the working class to volunteer. As a result of a differential balance of recruitment Britain’s physical and intellectual elite, it appeared, was being destroyed by a lethal casualty rate. This was the premise of Lord Lansdowne’s famous letter: ‘We are slowly but surely killing off the best of the male population of these islands’.7 The only way to correct this, other than by ending the war, was to dilute the middle-class character of the army and thus diminish the number of ‘the best of the male population’ who were being killed by compelling more working-class men to enlist. A class-eugenic definition of society therefore pointed to conscription; whereas a race-eugenic definition, as we shall see, pointed against it. Once the issue of conscientious objection was settled − though not to everyone’s satisfaction − another obstacle to military conscription was removed.8 The right to object to fighting a war on grounds of principled con­ viction, religious or otherwise, was only written into the Military Service Act (January 1916) after Sir John Simon’s resignation, and largely for political reasons. The provision for ‘secular’ objection, which was based upon the Australian Defence Act of 1910, was inserted at Asquith’s insistence. But 6

7 8

Ibid., 92 (25 Oct. 1915). The Derby scheme was the last (and unsuccessful) attempt to secure the necessary numbers by volunteering. Despite Clark, fewer country ‘lads’ than town loafers volunteered; Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 81. Gregory notes that there were more busmen than agricultural labourers in the army. Daily Telegraph, 29 November 1917. The letter, which was originally a memorandum for the Cabinet, was sent first to The Times, which refused to publish it. For conscientious objection, see: John W. Graham, Conscription and Conscience: A History, 1916–1919 (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1922); Ralph J.Q. Adams and Philip P. Poirier, The Conscription Controversy in Great Britain, 1900–1918 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987); John Rae, Conscience and Politics: The British Government and the Conscientious Objector 1916–1919 (London: Oxford University Press, 1970).

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the British Act, unlike the Australian, was vague. It was unclear whether objectors had ‘absolute exemption’, as Asquith appears to have intended, and what was ‘work of national importance’ (the alternative offered). Nor was much guidance given to Appeals Tribunals, which were often in­ experienced in such matters – only 2 per cent of the appeals they heard were from objectors – and unsympathetic. The objectors had a hard time. Six thousand, out of 16,000, at some point ended up in the hands of the army. For the rest, many civilians disliked working with them – the Board of Agriculture even preferring German POWs. Parliament made obvious its view by disfranchising conscientious objectors for five years.9 Nevertheless, the legislation, by recognising a ‘secular’ as well as a religious conscience, shielded military conscription from some of its moral obloquy. Patriotism, eugenics, fairness all favoured military conscription. By them­selves, however, they were not enough. More than these, military con­ scription was a result of the war Britain found itself fighting. Few members of Asquith’s government had imagined in 1914 that Britain would have to fight a colossal land war as well as a naval one; or that it would have to prop up its exigent allies financially and physically, not just by men and money, but by ‘munitions of war’. Britain was the pole around which its allies revolved. This placed huge pressure on it to find both millions of service­men and millions to work in its munitions factories. For Britain, the problem was the distribution of manpower, not simply finding men for the western front. Britain’s political leaders could have relieved the pressure by demanding that its generals cease practising war by attrition. They didn’t. Instead, ‘conscription’ in Britain, unlike Australia, meant civil conscription as much as military. For some, including Britain’s trade union leaders, civil mattered more than military; indeed, it was regarded as the greater danger. When Lloyd George became Minister of Munitions in May 1915 he found that much of British industry had been denuded by over-enthusiastic volunteering. For him, policy was as much to get men out of the army as to get them in. Thus he favoured both civil and military conscription – though not always publicly.10 Since it became likely that he would not get both, other than by force majeure, military conscription was for him a way of procuring a kind of civil conscription while not saying so. It allowed the government to exclude people from the armed forces if they were thought necessary for 9 For the fate of this provision, see below. 10 Turner, British Politics in the Great War, 147; Adams and Poirier, Conscription Controversy in Great Britain, 178.

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munitions. Military conscription plus the schedule of exempted occupations − those occupations necessary for defence production − became Britain’s manpower policy. One cannot be understood without the other. In turn, this gave the labour movement enormously enhanced authority. Manpower policy depended fundamentally on the goodwill and skills of the highly unionised skilled working class. As Arthur Henderson (after the outbreak of war, effectively the leader of the Labour Party) told the Cabinet: Labour ‘was the only party in the state which has it in its power to make dissent effective’.11 The labour movement as a whole did not particularly like military conscription. It did all it could to encourage volunteering; but it always, with some exceptions, agreed that if voluntary enlistment did not secure the numbers sought by the army, it would support military conscrip­ tion. Moreover, if the price to be paid for opposing military conscription were the imposition of civil conscription, it was a price the union leaders were unwilling to pay. They opposed each step to military conscription; but on each occasion gave in. Both the Asquith and Lloyd George Governments made concessions on anything the unions thought too close to civil conscription. The first Muni­ tions of War Act (1915) was significantly amended to eliminate its more penal clauses.12 Under the ‘trade card scheme’, the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, the most privileged of the unions, was given the right to decide who among its members went into the army and who stayed at home – a task for which its leaders were scarcely qualified.13 The government effectively handed over the running of the docks to the dockers. In return for accepting ‘dilution’ – the employment of women and unskilled men in munitions – the skilled unions were promised, and received, a return to pre-war patterns of employment.14 But it was, nonetheless, a system of quasi-civil conscription. Very few were free to do as they wished. Men were either in the armed forces, or medically unfit or working in occupations approved by the state. Many women entered the labour market and became indispensable to the British wartime economy. Nor was the state always unwilling to contemplate coercion. In 1918 the system wobbled, despite the patriotic response to the Ludendorff offensive in March. Lloyd George even threatened to call up 11 12 13 14

Keith Middlemas, Politics in Industrial Society (London: Andre Deutsch, 1979), 87. H.A. Clegg, A History of British Trade Unions since 1889, 1911–1933 vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 127–136. Bernard Waites, A Class Society at War (Leamington Spa: Berg), 198. The Restoration of Pre-War Practices Act (1919).

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strikers in July 1918.15 Had not Germany unexpectedly collapsed in August 1918 it is not certain that quasi-civil conscription as a system would have survived. But it did; and the labour movement’s readiness to accept military conscription was one reason why. Such readiness was not simply the result of a power-political bargain. It also had an ideological element. Whether civil conscription was quasi or full, Britain was governed by a form of state socialism that was attractive to many in the labour movement and in socialist societies like the Fabians. The state mobilised and directed the country’s resources in a way that went well beyond Edwardian radicalism. G.D.H. Cole, a man who hovered be­ tween Fabianism and guild socialism, concluded that if the country were to fight the war as it wanted, then forms of conscription, both civil and military, were inevitable.16 For people like Cole or Sidney and Beatrice Webb the ‘conscription-war’ legitimated state action and demonstrated its power. For the unions such ‘socialism’, in which conscription was central, crucially determined their views of the state and of political action. In his presidential address to the 1917 TUC, John Hill of the Boilermakers said that ‘the prejudice of Trade Unionists against politics has hitherto held us back’, but ‘that the events of the last three years have taken the scales from our eyes … in our ranks today [the man] who is neither a Government official nor a member of some Government Committee is unknown to the movement’.17 Thus, via manpower policy and the debate over conscription, the unions adopted a more active definition of the state and politics, which in turn made possible the reorganisation of the Labour Party in 1917–18 and its emergence as the second party of the state.18 Some also argued that conscription was democratic. The army was not a mirror of the nation. The social pattern of volunteering, even the ‘pals’ battalions designed to exploit local loyalties, still more the ‘public school’ and ‘stockbroker’ battalions, were class exclusive. While the army remained 15 Clegg, British Trade Unions, 191. 16 Cole wrote that conscription ‘was a war necessity on the assumption of a fight to the finish on which the war was being fought’. He agreed that the government had never been entirely straight in its dealings with the unions, but ‘it was also the case that the claims of total war had to be met, if victory were the object, and that the devious course actually followed by the Government was probably the only, and certainly the easiest, way of reaching the required end’; G.D.H. Cole, A History of the Labour Party since 1914 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1948), 28. 17 TUC, Annual Congress Report 1917, 54–6. 18 I have discussed this elsewhere; Ross McKibbin, The Evolution of the Labour Party (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1975), 91–106.

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a volunteer force, it was thought, it would remain so.19 Whether in fact it made the army more working class is questionable. More working men were exempted from military service than their social superiors, and even after conscription the officer class remained non-working class. Few working men attained more than NCO stripes and the ‘temporary gentlemen’ who did, were rarely working class. Nevertheless, a ‘conscript army’ was sufficiently like a ‘citizen’s army’ to suggest that it was, if not really democratic, at least more democratic than a volunteer one. Would the British people, unlike the Australians, have supported mil­ itary conscription had they been asked? Given that Britain had refused to introduce conscription in peacetime we might expect them to have said No. But an ‘Australian’ referendum in Britain was not possible since it, unlike Australia, was not a democratic state. No-one suggested a conscription referendum in Britain; in any case such a referendum would have been almost impossible. By 1916 no-one in Britain knew who exactly was entitled to vote so derelict was its electoral system20 – but they did know that women were not entitled and a plebiscite on conscription that excluded them would have been of dubious legitimacy. There is, however, some evidence of how any vote might have gone. The parliamentary by-elections held through­ out the war, though on increasingly out of date electoral registers, suggest that the majority of men would have voted Yes. In none was an anticonscriptionist elected while in several super-patriots were.21 The most im­ portant by-election was in Merthyr Tydvil (November 1915) held to elect Keir Hardie’s successor. Hardie, though a reluctant supporter of the war, was an anti-conscriptionist of the purest water. Under the Party truce22 the seat should have gone to the Labour candidate, James Winstone, an official of the South Wales Miners, without opposition. Winstone had narrowly defeated for the pre-selection a miners’ agent and strong conscriptionist, C.B. Stanton, who immediately resigned his post and easily won the seat as a pro-conscription independent. After the by-election ‘there was now little which could effectively stand in the way of compulsory service if the results of 19 20 21

22

For the pattern of recruiting, see Gregory, The Last Great War, 70–100. The question of the wartime electorate is discussed in Martin Pugh, Electoral Reform in War and Peace, 1906–1918 (Routledge and Kegan Paul: London, 1978). One of these was Ben Tillett, who won a by-election for North Salford in 1917 as a super-patriotic independent. Since he did not stand against a Labour candidate he managed to remain within the Party and was re-elected as an official Labour candidate in 1918. The Party truce was an agreement amongst the main parties not to contest byelections in seats they did not hold already.

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the Derby canvass were inadequate [which they were]’.23 The Merthyr result probably represented predominant male opinion throughout the war. This disputed preselection implied that the British labour movement could have split over conscription, as did the Australian. Yet it did not. One reason is timing. The by-election was held at a moment when the labour movement was officially opposed to conscription. By January 1916, however, the movement as a whole had accepted it. Furthermore, as we have noted, in Britain conscription meant civil and military; and many wanted both. One result of the bargaining over the distribution of manpower was to associate the British trade unions with the state in the management of the war. Paradoxically, therefore, conscription in Britain had a socially and politically integrative effect; this is why Arthur Henderson was prepared to support Hughes and conscription at the time of the first Australian referendum. The bargain, of course, involved more than military or industrial conscription. The state imposed a heavy excess profits duty on industrialists and high levels of income tax on the well-to-do: not exactly conscription of wealth but more serious than anything in Australia,24 and unquestionably done to conciliate the working class as well as to pay for the war. The Labour Party was also led by people for whom loyalty to the movement made them reluctant to abandon it, and readier to accept policies they did not necessarily favour. A handful of people left the Party in 1918 rather than withdraw from Lloyd George’s Government (as the Labour Party required), but most of those who rejected conscription and most of those who saw pacifist conspiracies everywhere stayed within its bosom. 25 Moreover, Henderson was not like Hughes. His tendency was to be emollient; to keep people in rather than force them out. Unity was further preserved because by 1918 there was widespread agreement within the labour movement on postwar economic and foreign policy. Conscription was so central to the way Britain fought the war that we should be cautious before disentangling the effects of one from those of the other. There are, nonetheless, some consequences we can reasonably attribute to conscription alone. Compulsion meant that the corrosive hostility which 23

Adams and Poirier, Conscription Controversy in Great Britain, 132. Stanton had strong support from other patriotic trade unionists and the newly formed British Workers League. For the by-election, see J.O. Stubbs, ‘Lord Milner and Patriotic Labour’, English Historical Review 87 (1972): 723. 24 McKibbin, Parties and People (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 45; and below. 25 The two most important were Ramsay MacDonald, who never accepted conscription, and J.R. Clynes, who did not want to resign from Lloyd George’s government (he was Food Controller), but agreed to do so.

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existed between those who volunteered and those who ‘shirked’ was much less marked in Britain than in Australia.26 By 1916 if you were not in the army you were likely to be somewhere where the state sent you – usually for a military purpose. The comparative absence of such hostility (together with the growing sense after 1918 that they were perhaps right about the war) favoured the conscientious objectors. The first objector to be elected to the House of Commons, Morgan Jones, was elected as early as August 1921. Ramsay MacDonald, not a pacifist, but known to be ‘unsound’, failed to win a by-election in 1919 when feelings were still high, but was elected for Aberavon, a seat with a conscriptionist history, in 1922. The five-year disfranchisement of objectors was never enforced. In 1929 the second Labour Government ended wartime penalties on objectors in the civil service. Another consequence is that the principle of conscription became en­ trenched. There was little popular opposition to its reintroduction in 1939, though the Labour Party notionally opposed it on not very convincing grounds. Many Labour MPs and candidates were in practice uneasy about such opposition, having discovered that hostility to conscription among their constituents was weak.27 Labour made no effort to oppose it once war broke out. In party-political terms conscription probably did most damage to the Liberal Party. To the Conservatives conscription came naturally; and Labour turned it to its advantage. But it was one of those wartime policies that did much to demoralise the Liberals. Most Liberal MPs reluctantly accepted conscription; but a significant number did not, and it strained the Party’s religious networks almost to breaking point.28 It also offended the Party’s economists, like Asquith’s second Chancellor of the Exchequer, Reginald McKenna, who thought, probably correctly, that it imposed demands upon the British economy which were simply unsustainable. But in the circumstances of the war that was an almost irrelevant objection.29 In light of the Liberal Party’s history and ideological traditions, however pragmatically it behaved it could never have turned conscription to its advantage. 26 27 28

See below. H. Nicolson, Unpublished Diaries (Balliol College, Oxford), 12 May, 1939. This is well discussed in Trevor Wilson, The Downfall of the Liberal Party 1914–1935 (London: Collins, 1966), 28–131. 29 Turner, British Politics and the Great War, 74–5.

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Australia The Australian experience was unique. No other country attempted to intro­ duce conscription via a plebiscite, even though Australia was subject to the same political and cultural influences as Britain, Canada and New Zealand, all of which introduced it by legislation. Australia is the more puzzling since it already conscripted men for military training and home defence. In reflecting on the result of the first referendum Hughes concluded that democracy was to blame: Certainly, this refusal on the part of a free people to make sacrif­ices to defend their freedom will be used as proof of the unwisdom of submitting great national themes directly to the people. (Hear, hear.)30

In private he was more specific. He told Andrew Bonar Law that con­ scription would have won ‘in spite of the official Labor organisations being against us, in spite of the Irish vote, in spite of the shirkers, if the farmers and the Conservatives had stood by us’. He thought about 50 per cent of the Labor vote went his way, but ‘the selfish vote, and the shirker vote and the Irish vote were too much for us’.31 The ‘selfish vote’ and the ‘shirker vote’, however, are not analytically helpful terms. Indeed, there has been little agreement as to who exactly voted Yes or No. Glen Withers attempted to establish the social characteristics of Yes and No votes cliometrically and concluded that, as a rule, women, farmers and British migrants voted Yes and that Catholics and the industrial working class voted No.32 Yet Withers, for methodological reasons, examined only the 46 ‘country’ seats in 1916 and thus largely excluded the metropolitan electorates. More local research suggests that voting patterns were more complicated – both for women33 and

30 31 32 33

Sydney Morning Herald, 10 November 1916. Hughes was speaking to a large audience in Melbourne when the result had become clear. L.F. Fitzhardinge, William Morris Hughes: A Political Biography vol. 2 (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1979), 215. Glenn Withers, ‘The 1916–1917 Conscription Referenda: A Cliometric Re-appraisal’, Historical Studies 20 (1982): 45. For a critique of Withers and an alternative analysis of the vote, see Goot’s chapter in this volume. On the strength of his examination of the Victorian seat of Indi, McQuilton concludes that there was not a specifically women’s vote one way or the other; John McQuilton, Rural Australia and the Great War: from Tarrawingee to Tangambalanga (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2001), 72. Smith argues that the antis appeal to women was actually successful; F.B. Smith, The Conscription Plebiscites (Melbourne: Victorian Historical Association, 1974), 12.

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farmers;34 while the ‘Labor’ vote, though it was essential for the victory of the antis, nonetheless fragmented during the plebiscites.35 These plebiscites were not like the referendum on the Communist Party dissolution bill where the Labor vote was probably more significant in its defeat.36 Why were the reasons for the popular acceptance of conscription in Britain not decisive in Australia? Perhaps the most important reason was the radically different socio-economic-military context. In Australia conscription meant military conscription; in Britain it meant civil and military conscription. Although Australia had some defence industries they were small. Australia was a provider of men, not heavy artillery, ships or aircraft. Its labour market changed very little during the war. Few women, unlike in Britain, entered it; there was scant defence industry to enter.37 Civil conscription – as the British understood it – was not a serious issue. There was little of that bargaining between the state and the unions which in Britain made them partners in the management of the war. Hughes had no real sense during the war of this ‘defence’ bargaining nor, in so far as it was needed, where it was needed. Australia’s most important defence industry was agriculture, but Hughes made few attempts to negotiate with those farmers most worried about their labour supply, many of whom voted against conscription. One result of this was a change in the character of industrial relations. Britain had strikes during the war, several serious; but in each case the gov­ ernment and the unions settled them, however precariously. It was accepted that the role of the Labour ministers, especially Henderson, was to act as go-betweens and as guarantors of good faith.38 These arrangements worked because it was known that much hung on them – victory or defeat. In Australia, however, industrial relations, especially the great strikes of 1917, 34

Stock argued of South Australia that it depended on what kind of farmer you were. Vine growers, dairy farmers and wool producers were reluctant to vote yes; the wheat farmers were readier to do so. The reason is probably their requirements for rural labour; Jenny T. Stock, ‘Farmers and the Rural Vote in South Australia in World War 1: The 1916 Conscription Referendum’, Historical Studies 21, 84 (1985): 48. 35 Stock notes that in the South Australian country seats the no vote was 13.2 per cent higher than the Labor vote in 1914; in the metropolitan seats the no vote was 10.5 per cent lower than the Labor vote in 1914; ‘Farmers and the Rural Vote’, 393.) 36 Murray Goot and Sean Scalmer, ‘Party Leaders, the Media, and Political Persuasion: The Campaigns of Evatt and Menzies on the Referendum to Protect Australia from Communism’, Australian Historical Studies 44, 2013: 84–86. 37 Joan Beaumont, ‘Whatever Happened to Patriotic Women, 1914–1918’, Australian His­torical Studies 31, no. 115 (2000), 274; McQuilton, Rural Australia and the Great War, 119. 38 Middlemas, Politics in Industrial Society, 86.

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were practised as episodes in the class struggle.39 In Britain, the behav­iour of the Australian and New South Wales governments would have been almost inconceivable; likewise, the obduracy of the unions. Nor was there anyone in the two governments (both led by men hated by the unions)40 who could act as a guarantor of good faith. After the disintegration of the Labor Party few had an interest in good faith, partly because the future of the war could not be thought to hang on consensual industrial relations; in Britain it could. The attitude of the Australian labour movement towards the war was probably always more ambivalent than the British, despite the many sim­ ilarities of culture and personnel. Andrews is right to argue that even in 1914 the Labor Party was ‘probably more confused than most historians have thought and the split was caused not just by conscription, but by the underlying difference in attitudes to Great Britain and the war itself ’.41 To some degree, this was a result of distance: it is easier to be relaxed about a war that is 12,000 miles away than one which is on the doorstep – which explains the behaviour of Tom Mann who, to the surprise and disappointment of his Australian admirers, strongly supported the war (though not conscription).42 Also largely absent from the Australian unions were the ‘super-patriots’ of the British labour movement, while Hughes’s own behaviour left the Australian unions in the hands of men who, ‘if not hostile’ to Britain, were certainly more critical.43 There was a history of open or concealed distrust between the industrial and political wings of the Australian movement, almost the reverse of that between the unions and the Parliamentary Labour Party in Britain. It was the socialism and the tepid patriotism of the British Party that most unions disliked. Nearly all Labor governments in Australia, however, were met with the suspicion that the parliamentary leadership would ‘rat’ – the sour spirit that infuses V. Gordon Childe’s How Labour Governs.44 It was their 39

The strikes began in the railway workshops in New South Wales after the railway commissioners decided to introduce a form of Taylorism. It then spread to the docks and other states. The strikers lost the strike and also lost their seniority, their union (which was deregistered), and some their jobs. 40 Hughes and W.A. Holman, the premier of New South Wales who had, like Hughes, left the Labor Party and ‘fused’ with the conscriptionist opposition. 41 Eric M. Andrews, The Anzac Illusion: Anglo-Australian Relations During World War1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 126. 42 David Day, John Curtin: A Life (Sydney: HarperCollinsPublishers, 1999), 195. 43 Andrews, Anzac Illusion, 125. 44 Vere Gordon Childe’s How Labour Governs: A Study of Worker’s Representation in Australia, Second edition (Parkville, Melbourne University Press, 1923/1964).

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over-patriotic enthusiasm and the parliamentary compromises that were held against them. This represented a semi-syndicalism which, though present in Britain, was much stronger in Australia. Thus the ‘pledge’ and its enforcement – expulsion usually being the first resort of the enforcers – were significantly more important in Australia than in Britain. As Smith argues, the rigidity of the ‘pledge’ meant that at moments of tension the Labor Party tended to fly apart; and this long predated the conscription crisis.45 To an extent, this was a result of the success of the Labor Party. On the eve of the conscription crisis Labor governed everywhere except Victoria. Labour governed nowhere in Britain except West Ham. Despite such success, or perhaps because of it, the unity of the Australian Labor Party was plainly fraying by 1914. What happened thereafter only brought the conflicts into ‘sharper focus’.46 Hughes’ decision not go ahead with constitutional refer­ en­dums long part of Labor’s program (which might have given the federal government more control of a teetering wartime economy), had already alienated many, as had the way the War Precautions Act was being ad­ ministered.47 Hughes’s further decision not to conscript wealth, only men, added to the process of alienation. It was this that decided the Queensland Premier T.J. Ryan, Hughes’s most formidable political opponent during the plebiscites, to oppose conscription.48 The Australian ‘Irish’, it is generally agreed, voted strongly against conscription. But Britain also had an Irish problem and there the Irish did not obstruct conscription. Britain had two Irish populations – those living in Great Britain and those in Ireland itself. Ireland also had two populations: a Catholic majority largely resident in the ‘South’ and a Protestant minority largely resident in the ‘North’. Britain restrained Catholic Irish-Irish hostility to conscription simply by exempting Ireland from the military service legislation. When that happened the Irish National Party dropped its opposition to conscription. The exemption of Ireland largely eliminated 45 Smith, Conscription Plebiscites, 13. 46 Raymond Evans, Loyalty and Disloyalty: Social Conflict on the Queensland Homefront, 1914–1918 (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1987), 7. 47 Ross McMullin, The Light on the Hill: The Australian Labor Party 1891–1991 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press Australia, 1991), 101; Stuart Macintyre, The Oxford History of Australia IV 1901–1942 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1986), 162. 48 Evans suggests that both Ryan and Theodore were equivocal about conscription until Hughes admitted there would be no conscription of wealth; Loyalty and Disloyalty, 93. But Theodore appears always to have been an anti-conscriptionist; Ross Fitzgerald, ‘Red Ted’: The Life of E.G. Theodore (Brisbane, 2002), 78.

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such hostility as there was among the British Irish – who could always return to Ireland if necessary. In 1918, when the outlook in France was grim, the government decided to extend conscription to Ireland.49 However, conscription in Ireland was never enforced once it became obvious that the Catholic clergy would not support it and that the government could not give Ireland Home Rule as a quid pro quo. Australia, however, was unable to contain the hostility of its Irish to con­scription. McKernan has argued that the Irish vote was really a workingclass vote. Catholic spokesmen, he suggests, always expressed opposition to conscription in secular and class terms: particular Irish grievances, even the Easter Rebellion, were secondary.50 But that the Australian Irish were largely Catholic and working-class does not mean that the working class was Catholic and Irish. Even at the outbreak of the war, though the ‘official’ Catholic Church was patriotic (as in Ireland), it was never as enthusiastic as the Protestant churches, while the patriotism of the Catholic bishops was partly political and never fully shared by their congregations.51 Nor did all contemporaries think that Mannix spoke for the working class. According to Scott, despite what Mannix said, he was everywhere ‘regarded as the mouthpiece of the Irish-Catholic element’.52 It was, then, in the nature of its history and its social composition that Australia could not convert its Irish to conscription, or, as did the British, deflect their hostility. Nor could racism be contained as in Britain by turning it into a classeugenic issue.53 Both sides, particularly the antis, who adopted a very strict definition of whiteness (it excluded the Maltese for instance),54 were shame­less in their racism. For the antis, conscription would destroy White Australia by killing off white Australians, who would be replaced by a low-paid mongrel 49 50

51 52 53 54

That was done to meet the grievances of those in Britain who had become eligible for conscription by the extension of the age-band at both ends from 17 to 51. Michael McKernan, ‘Catholics, Conscription and Archbishop Mannix’, Historical Studies, 17, no. 68 (1972): 300–308. Gilbert, who basically agrees with this argument, nevertheless concedes that Irish affairs ‘unconsciously as much as consciously’ influenced Irish Catholics during both referendums; Alan D. Gilbert, ‘Protestants, Catholics and Loyalty: An Aspect of the Conscription Controversies, 1916–17’, Politics 6, no. 1 (1971): 25; ‘The Conscription Referenda 1916–1917: The Impact of the Irish Crisis’, Historical Studies, 14, no 53 (1969), 66. McKernan, ‘Catholics, Conscription and Archbishop Mannix’: 300. He notes that by 1917 the Catholic bishops had ‘fallen into line’ with their own people. Ernest Scott, Australia During the War: Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, Vol XI (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1936), 421. See above. For the panic over the Maltese, see Evans, Loyalty and Disloyalty, 97–8.

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race favoured only by the capitalist. ‘She herself ’, as one anti put it, ‘did not want to be the grandmother of any piebald Australians’. Fear of the Asians could even cast doubt on the wisdom of the war itself. Greg McGirr, member of a prominent Labor family, thought Australia had nothing to fear from Germany, whose ambitions were confined to Europe. It ‘had more to fear from a nation [Japan] nearer to home’.55 To some of the Labor antis, therefore, conscription suited only the interests of the capitalist and the Japanese. They were, however, reluctant to acknowledge (as McGirr did) the logical conclusion of their race-argument: that Australia should not only have no conscription – it should not be in the war at all. It is this lurking doubt that partly explains the labour movement’s ‘ambivalence’ to the war we have already noted. Australia had a democratic franchise and could, therefore, ask the people whether they did or did not favour conscription. Hughes, once he had accepted the wisdom of conscription, not unreasonably thought that a plebiscite was the best way to secure it.56 Unlike regulations under the War Precautions Act, or even parliamentary legislation, it had democratic legit­ imacy. Had the nation voted Yes his opponents in the federal parliament would have found continued opposition difficult to justify. A plebiscite might even have preserved the unity of his government and the Labor Party. As it turned out, a plebiscite failed to secure conscription or preserve the unity of the Labor Party. Many of his colleagues were opposed even to a referendum, while the nature of the campaigns, and Hughes’s own actions, merely inflamed both opinion and political and personal relationships. Since the turnout was very high,57 and the campaigns very partisan they had all the attributes of a divisive election which drew people in and then drove them apart. As in Britain, the consequences to Australia of the conscription debate were to some degree inseparable from those of the war itself. But they were not the same. A war without conscription or the conscription plebiscites would almost certainly have done less damage to the Labor Party. As a result of Hughes’ decision Labor lost much of its pre-war elite and a significant part of its electorate. When Labor was rebuilt in the country, it was often on the backs of the anti-conscription leagues and in the towns and mining districts. In Indi, for instance, the rebuilt Labor Party ‘would never again 55

Both quotations from David Day, Chifley (Sydney: HarperCollinsPublishers, 2001), 116, 119. 56 McMullin, Light on the Hill, 103; Fitzhardinge, William Morris Hughes, 179–80. 57 82.8 per cent in 1916 and 81.3 per cent in 1917.

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attract the broad support it had enjoyed in the region before 1916’.58 Between 1914 and 1940 Labor won only one federal election (1929) and did not come close to winning another, other than 1940 itself. The Party recovered faster in the states; but it was not trusted with what could be thought the higher interests of the nation until the Second World War. Labor’s obdurate attitude to those who left – officially they were never to be readmitted59 - meant that they had nowhere else to go, other than to the conservative parties (where they had little influence).60 For some this was easy. That is where they were going anyway. But it was less true of Hughes. Before the war he was not obviously inclining to the Right, and after the war he retained some of his old radicalism. That he would not be welcomed by Labor as a prodigal son is no surprise. But it meant that when he did break with the conservative parties, as in 1929 and 1943, he had no alternative but to inveigle himself once more into whatever form they took. Such obduracy accentuated the tendency to purge those out of favour or guilty of ‘indiscipline’ or of dubious class origin. 61 The orgy of expulsions that characterised the interwar Labor Party was a result.62 The conscription campaigns also inflamed Australian sectarianism. They further isolated the Catholic community in civil life and accelerated the evolution of two antithetical worlds, Catholic and non-Catholic, that rarely intersected but were well-known to almost everybody. The director-general of recruiting, Donald Mackinnon, attributed the rapid decline in recruit­ ing after the first referendum, and its failure to recover, to the bitterness gener­ated by the conscription campaigns, to the railway strikes in New South Wales and to the extreme sectarianism in Victoria. All were inter­ dependent. 63 The increasing habit of identifying the Labor Party with 58 McQuilton, Rural Australia and the Great War, 95. The problems Labor had in the country were, of course, related to the rise of the various farmers’ organisations that eventually coalesced into the Country Party; see B.D. Graham, The Formation of the Australian Country Parties (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1966), 74–5, 103–114. 59 McMullin, Light on the Hill, 119. 60 L.F. Crisp, ‘New Light on the Trials and Tribulations of W.M. Hughes’, Historical Studies Australia and New Zealand, 10 no. 37 (1961): 10. 61 One victim was William Higgs, Treasurer in Hughes’s first ministry and an anti-conscriptionist, who was expelled by the Queensland branch because he had supported Hughes’s attempts to win more federal powers over commerce and industry – something perfectly consistent with the Labor program. Higgs joined the National Party. 62 Stephen Alomes, A Nation at Last (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1988), 66. 63 Scott, Australia During the War, 398.

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Catholicism, another effect of the conscription debate, was to isolate it like Catholicism itself. The war enthroned a conservative form of Australian nationalism. This might have happened anyway, but the disruption of the Labor Party by conscription made it almost inevitable. The appropriation by the political Right of the ‘digger’, with his democratic swagger, and of Anzac, replaced a broadly-based egalitarianism ‘by spiritually untruthful myths of war’64 whereby Australian nationalism could be incorporated into a wider imperial patriotism; and its ex-servicemen’s organisations acquired an overt political conservatism which its British counterparts never had.65 However, one of the most damaging consequences of the conscription campaigns lay in their failure, for that perpetuated the distinction ‘fostered by soldiers themselves’ between those who served and those who didn’t. About 50 per cent of eligible Australians did not serve in the war, and between them and those who did was a perpetual hostility people recognised even if it was not always openly expressed. The more the digger insisted on his privileges the more he excited the antagonism of those who, for whatever reason, stayed at home.66

Conclusion What general conclusions might we draw? The first is that Britain’s pol­ itical, industrial and military situations favoured the adoption of military conscription. Such evidence as exists suggests that it was acceptable to the majority of the male population, as it was to the unions as part of a bargain by which they avoided full civil conscription but agreed to a quasi-civil conscription. A consequence of this bargain was that, by comparison with most other participants, Britain enjoyed a high degree of political stability and social integration.67 In Australia no such bargaining was possible because Australia’s contribution was conceived, not least by Hughes, primarily as 64 Smith, Conscription Plebiscites, 21. 65 See Ross McKibbin, ‘The Political Cultures of Australia and Britain: How Alike Were They?’, in Australia and the World: A Festschrift for Neville Meaney, eds Joan Beaumont and Matthew Jordan (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2013), 187–188; also G.L. Kristianson, The Politics of Patriotism: The Pressure Group Activities of the Returned Servicemen’s League (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1966). 66 Stephen Garton, The Cost of War: Australians Return (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1996) 13; Gammage, The Broken Years, 307–08. 67 Middlemas, Politics in Industrial Society, 123.

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cannon-fodder. Conscription was defined as military conscription and Hughes made too little attempt to bargain with those, including many in the rural sector, who felt they had something to lose by it. When conscription was introduced in Australia in the Second World War it had a war economy, with significant defence industries, much more like Britain’s ‘conscription economy’ in the war of 1914–1918. The second is that while in both countries the interwar years were dom­ inated by the conservative parties only in Australia was this related to conscription. In Britain the Labour Party emerged from the war much strengthened. The Liberal Party was the real victim. Furthermore, while there were those who remained conscientiously opposed to conscription, it was now established as acceptable to the majority of the population. In Australia, however, the Labor Party, at least at a national level, was much weakened, and to the extent that social innovation depended upon it, Australia ceased to be a social laboratory for the world. And conscription was still capable of raising passions. Curtin took a risk with the limited form that was eventually introduced in the Second World War; he had to live with E.J. Ward’s comment that he was willing to send young Australians to the slaughterhouse where he, Curtin, had been unwilling to go.68 The third is that both countries were sectarian and racist but in different ways. In Britain sectarianism was not inflamed by war partly because the ‘Irish question’ was largely settled in 1922. Sectarianism remained confined to where it had always been. But in Australia sectarianism was further en­ trenched. As to race, the dominant view in Britain during the war was largely class-eugenic and so sympathetic to conscription. Australia, however, was less concerned with the fitness of the race than its possible disappearance. That was an obstacle pro-conscriptionists found difficult to hurdle. The last is that Australia’s failure to introduce conscription opened the way to the bitterness that divided those who had volunteered from those, the ‘shirkers’, who had not. This also had a long life. Earle Page’s reference in Parliament on 20 April 1939 to R.G. Menzies’ failure to volunteer in the First World War is a famous example. In Britain the introduction of conscription much diminished this bitterness: if you weren’t in the army there was usually a good reason. Australia was subject to serious social division because it did not have conscription. Britain largely escaped that because it did. 68 Day, Curtin, 491.

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Part 4 Legacies

Cha pte r Eight

L E GE N D A N D L A M E N TAT ION Remembering the Anti-Conscription Struggle Sean Scalmer

What is remembered of the anti-conscription struggles? What has been forgotten? The Anzac legend is a touchstone of national identity and Anzac memories the subject of rich historical study.1 But the interest in war and memory has only rarely been extended to memories of wartime activism,2 and no scholar has so far ventured a comprehensive analysis of the recol­lec­tion of the anti-conscription struggle. Like the campaign itself, the collective remembrance of the plebiscites of 1916 and 1917 seems to have been over­ shadowed by the vast cliffs of the Gallipoli shore. In a striking polemic, Jeremy Sammut has offered the only sustained interpretation. Writing in the Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, Sammut identified a ‘legend’ around the campaign, marked out in labour memorials and in the histories of the Old Left. An extension of radical nationalist mythology, the legend depicted conscription as a threat to Australia’s ‘democratic traditions’, and its defeat as a significant victory in a ‘democratic experiment’. ‘No’ votes ‘saved Australia’ from the prospect of 1

2

On the Anzac legend: Carolyn Holbrook, Anzac: The Unauthorised Biography (Sydney: NewSouth, 2014). On memories: e.g., Alistair Thomson, Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994); John Lack, ed., ANZAC Remembered: Selected writings of K.S. Inglis (Melbourne: History Department, University of Melbourne, 1998). A rare exception, including oral histories of anti-Vietnam activism, is: Beverley Symons and Rowan Cahill, eds., A Turbulent Decade: Social Protest Movements and the Labour Movement, 1965–1975 (Newtown: Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, 2005).

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‘military dictatorship’, so the legend went; and the ‘action of the People’ confirmed ‘anti-militarism’ as a defining feature of the Australian way.3 Sammut writes as a critic of Labor mythology, and his determination to ‘bust’ the anti-conscription legend has been shared by others committed to the anti-Labor cause. The architects of conscription for Vietnam excoriated Labor’s leaders for their apparent inability to move on from a ‘fifty year old attitude on conscription’4 or to get their minds ‘outside the conscription issues of 1916 and 1917’.5 The champions of conscription in the press at this time mourned the survival of ‘old-time shibboleths’6 within the Labor Party, and alleged a ‘desperate desire to cling to what was once an important principle’.7 From this perspective, anti-conscription traditions were a ‘stubborn prejudice’ or a ‘flight of unrealism’;8 ‘appeals to history’ were ‘not enough’ in a rapidly changing world.9 But the positing of a Labor myth around anti-conscription is not the exclusive habit of the Party’s political enemies. More sympathetic historians have also supported the notion of a legend or mythology around the con­ scription plebiscites, though their emphases have sometimes differed slightly. Manning Clark, for example, identified an enduring ‘legend’ that ‘Australian democracy’ had been ‘saved’ by the votes of October 1916.10 Ken Inglis, for his part, associated the ‘radical legend of conscription’ with the idea that ‘the Australian working class was anti-militarist and anti-war’.11 A number of labour historians have also referenced ‘Labor’s anti-conscription

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Jeremy Sammut, ‘ ‘Busting’ the Anti-conscription Legend’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 91, no. 2 (2002), especially 163–65. Gordon Freeth, House of Representatives, 24 March 1966. Hansard for the House of Representatives and Senate is available on a fully searchable digital database: http://www.aph.gov.au/ Harold Holt, House of Representatives, 24 March 1966. ‘Canberra Commentary: Effect of Senate Result on Party Leadership’, Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), 8 December 1964. ‘Labor’s Fatal Mistake on National Service’, Canberra Times, 4 December 1964. ‘A Flight of Unrealism’, Argus, 16 December 1942. ‘Seven Days to Go’, SMH, 20 November 1966. C.M.H. Clark, A History of Australia, Vol. VI: ‘The Old Tree Dead and the Young Green Tree’ 1916–1935 (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1987), 40. Ken Inglis, cited from address to the history section of the ANZAAS Congress, in ‘War History Is Not Noticed’, Canberra Times, 25 January 1964. See also revised version of the address as: K.S. Inglis, ‘The Anzac Tradition’, Meanjin 24, no. 1 (1965): 25–44.

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mythology’,12 or a ‘tradition’,13 usually without elaborating its specific dimensions. Does the evidence sustain the notion of an abiding ‘legend’ of this kind? In the following pages I show that the victors in the conscription battles celebrated their collective achievements and elevated anti-conscription as a central element of Labor tradition. Moreover, when conscription re-emerged as an issue of contention in World War Two and in later years, its opponents sometimes recalled earlier victories and laid claim to a tradition of party and people. But this was a ‘tradition’ or ‘legend’ that was undermined by the actions of later Labor governments, and by changes in protest activity, movement culture, and intellectual context. In place of a legend of democratic victory, the battle over conscription came increasingly to be associated with bitterness, vituperation, and social division. Earlier connections between democracy and anti-conscription were thereby obscured, blinding Australians to the significance of this episode in the history of democratic life.

A Labour Tradition Unquestionably, the victory over conscription was hailed by its opponents and vigorously celebrated in succeeding years. The Catholic Press editorialised events as: ‘Triumphant Democracy: Australia Is Still Free’.14 The Labor Party left behind after Hughes’ defection acclaimed the referendum as the ‘grandest victory’ of ‘democracy over militarism’ in the ‘annals of history’.15 At a rally in Frankston Park, thousands turned out to express their gratitude for having escaped the ‘shackles of slavery’.16 More enduring celebrations were also contemplated. A gold-lettered memorial was painted onto the foyer of the Trades Hall in Melbourne, recording the votes cast, commemorating the action of the people, and registering the appreciation of unionists for those soldiers who ‘voted against the introduction of conscription into this country’.17 Early in 1918, 12

Nick Dyrenfurth, ‘Labor goes to war with itself over the rights of workers’, Weekend Australian, 23 April 2011. 13 Brian Fitzpatrick, A Short History of the Australian Labor Movement, Second edition (South Melbourne: Macmillan of Australia, 1968), 220. 14 Jeff Kildea, Tearing the Fabric: Sectarianism in Australia 1910–1925 (Sydney: Citadel Books, 2000), 179. 15 L.L. Robson, The First A.I.F.: A Study of its Recruitment 1914–1918 (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1970), 118. 16 Clark, A History of Australia, 77–8. 17 Sammut, ‘”Busting” the Anti-Conscription Legend’: 163.

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the Victorian Trades Hall also supported a motion for a ‘general annual holiday’ to mark the anniversary of the first referendum, so as to allow workers to ‘meet & rejoice’ in memory of the ‘preservation of their liberty’.18 Labor journalist D. Kneebone completed a manuscript on the referendum in late 1918, promising ‘A Record of the Great Fight for Freedom from the Workers’ Viewpoint’.19 Though the public holiday was not gazetted and the manuscript unpublished, the memories of a great victory nonetheless persisted. Bested in national elections until 1929, the Party affirmed that ‘effective enunciation of Labor principles’ outweighed any ‘temporary loss of seats’;20 the act of taking comfort in ‘righteous defeat’ became an enduring habit, wedding Labor more strongly to established principle.21 Moving leftward in the aftermath of war, Labor pledged to abolish compulsory military train­ ing or service at home,22 and to ensure that ‘Peace’ and ‘Internationalism’ were inculcated in the classroom. A commitment to ‘world peace’ was even considered the ‘foremost’ of ‘Labor ideals and principles’ by some Laborites;23 certainly, anti-militarism was confirmed as an abiding feature of the Party’s radicalism.24 The dates of the conscription victories appear to have remained consistent moments of Labor ceremony and commemoration for many years, and as late as the nineteen forties one Labor parliamentarian was confident that ‘Time will not wither nor custom stale’ the ‘infinite variety’ of means by which the party might ‘congratulate itself ’ on the ‘anniversaries’ of this ‘great achievement’.25 An Anti-Conscription Celebration League marked two decades since the 1916 plebiscite with a penny pamphlet by Maurice 18

Minutes of Trades Hall Council Meeting, 9 May 1918; Minute book 1914–1921 Trades Hall Council, Victorian Trades Hall Council Collection, University of Melbourne Archives. 19 H. Kneebone to T.J. Ryan, n.d., Queensland State Archives, Item ID 862687, file 6452. I am indebted to Bart Zino for this material. 20 Victorian Central Executive, cited in Paul Strangio, Neither Power Nor Glory: 100 Years of Political Labor in Victoria, 1865–1956 (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2012), 124. 21 Ibid. 22 Sammut, ‘”Busting” the Anti-Conscription Legend’: 178. 23 See Phillip Deery and Frank Bongiorno, ‘Labor, Loyalty and Peace: Two Anzac Controversies of the 1920s’, Labour History, no. 106 (2014): 209–10. 24 Neville Kirk, ‘ ‘Australians for Australia’: The Right, the Labor Party and Contested Loyalties to Nation and Empire in Australia, 1917 to the Early 1930s’, Labour History, no. 91 (2006): 99. 25 Frank Brennan, House of Representatives, 4 February 1943.

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Blackburn, 26 following the publication of a more substantial history by Leslie Jauncey the year beforehand.27 Jauncey’s work, in particular, became something of an ‘official history’ for the anti-conscription movement;28 the text would be cited by opponents of conscription in print and from the soapbox for decades to come.29 The spectre of a renewed push for conscription for overseas service con­fi rmed the continuing commitment of many Laborites to the policies enun­ciated in World War One; it may also have enhanced awareness of the status of anti-conscription as a ‘Labour tradition’. Just as left-wing critics of the Hawke Government imagined and applied a particular version of the Labour tradition in their opposition to its economic policies, 30 so Prime Minister Curtin’s proposal to deploy conscripts in the South-West Pacific in WWII encouraged dissidents to depict anti-conscription as the Party’s ‘greatest achievement’, 31 the ‘spirit and soul’ of the party, 32 and even ‘an integral part of the unwritten constitution of Australia’.33 Arthur Calwell, shortly to become Curtin’s Minister for Information, warned that if Curtin’s plans were followed ‘they would have to remove the tablets on the walls of the [Melbourne] Trades Hall’.34 The ‘working-class can and will fight fascism in its own traditional way’, argued one contributor to the Labor Call: ‘That way is not the conscripted way.’35 Of course, this was an eloquent certainty contradicted by subsequent events, and Curtin’s proposals were eventually implemented. But the defeat of anti-conscriptionists in World War Two was also matched by a revival of 26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35

Maurice Blackburn, The Conscription Referendum of 1916 (Melbourne: AntiConscription Celebration League, 1936). Leslie C. Jauncey, The Story of Conscription in Australia (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1935). Sammut, ‘”Busting” the Anti-Conscription Legend’: 164. Print: Bertha Walker, How to Defeat Conscription: A Story of the 1916 and 1917 Campaigns in Victoria (Melbourne: Anti-Conscription Jubilee Committee, 1968), 1 and D.W. Allen, Letter to Editor, ‘ ‘Herald’ Readers’ Views on New Defence Plans’, Sydney Morning Herald, 16 November 1964. Soapbox: Guido Baracchi cited in ‘50year fight continues’, Sydney Morning Herald, 26 November 1966. The classic expression is Graham Maddox, The Hawke Government and Labor Tradition (Ringwood: Penguin, 1989). Frank Brennan, House of Representatives, 10 December 1942. Ibid., 4 February 1943. H.E.B. [Henry Ernest Boote], ‘Conscription Must Be Rejected’, Labor Call, 3 December 1942. ‘No Conscription for Overseas’, Labor Call, 6 May 1943. A.T. Brodney, ‘Conscription Corrupts Society’, Labor Call, 24 December 1942.

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anti-conscription memories. It was in the aftermath of Curtin’s success that Brian Fitzpatrick’s Short History of the Australian Labor Movement notably described anti-conscription as Labor’s ‘tradition par excellence’.36 Two decades later, Arthur Calwell had risen to become Labor’s parlia­ mentary leader, and a Liberal-Country Party government planned to despatch conscripts to Vietnam. Calwell now emphasised his unwavering confidence in the continuity of Labor’s anti-conscription traditions more strongly, still. ‘We are an anti-conscriptionist party’, Calwell told the House of Representatives, ‘and when we cease to be that, we cease to be an Australian Labor Party’. 37 Calwell’s colleagues agreed that the Government’s plans were ‘an offence against Australian traditions and Australian democratic history’.38 Labor rallies invited citizens to ‘Come and pay tribute to the “oldtimers” who beat conscription in 1916’. 39 Propagandists reprinted old cartoons, beseeching readers to ‘Remember 1916–17’.40 Trade union leaders pronounced that ‘the position has not changed’.41 One Labor Senator even attempted to revive the language of the famed World War One leaflet, ‘The Blood Vote’.42 At times, the quest to defeat conscription in the present provoked a more elaborate engagement with the battles of the past. An Anti-Conscription Jubilee Committee based in Victoria rapidly published two pamphlets com­ posed by the veterans of the earlier struggle: E.J. Holloway’s The Australian Victory over Conscription in 1916–17 (1966),43 and Bertha Walker’s How to Defeat Conscription: A Story of the 1916 and 1917 Campaigns in Victoria (1968).44 Writing in the Communist Party’s theoretical journal, Australian Left Review, historian and activist Eric Fry also considered ‘Conscription Then and Now: today’s anti-conscription compared with the conscription struggles 36 Fitzpatrick, A Short History of the Australian Labor Movement, 220. 37 ‘Calwell attacks Vietnam policy’, Canberra Times, 16 March 1966. 38 Allan Fraser, House of Representatives, 16 November 1964. 39 ‘They Called it the Blood Vote’, Leaflet, Anti-Conscription Jubilee Committee, 1966. Sam Merrifield Collection, Manuscripts, State Library of Victoria, Box 121, Folder 14. 40 ‘Remember 1916–17’; Seamen’s Union of Australia, 1969, Sam Merrifield Collection, Manuscripts, State Library of Victoria, Box 121, Folder 12. 41 See K.S. Inglis, ‘The Great Conscription Row’, Canberra Times, 21 November 1964. 42 Patrick Kennelly, Senate, 10 March 1970. 43 E.J. Holloway, The Australian Victory over Conscription in 1916–17 (Melbourne: AntiConscription Jubilee Committee, 1966). 44 Walker, How to Defeat Conscription.

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of 1916–17’.45 Explicitly composed to aid the contemporary campaign, each of these works shared the impulse of commemoration for immediate political purpose. Holloway’s work was ‘published to commemorate the success of the Australian people in defeating the Conscription proposals of November 1916 [sic] and December 1917’.46 Walker proclaimed that the results of the plebiscites ‘cannot be overstated in giving a tradition to the labor movement’.47 Fry recalled the events of half a century ago as ‘treasured in the collective memory’,48 and as the basis of a ‘strong and deep-seated tradition’ against conscription.49 In arguing against conscription in the ‘sixties, they sought to assert a continuous tradition, linking present with past.50 Until the late 1960s, the notion of a labour movement ‘legend’ or ‘tradition’ around conscription therefore appears to be supported by a range of evidence. Importantly, this was a tradition kept alive less by the routine acts of memorialisation (the construction of memorials, the passage of anni­versaries) than by the preoccupations of the labour movement itself. Moments of political combat over conscription provoked heightened interest in the struggles of the past, and undoubtedly encouraged labourites to look upon earlier events in heroic and mythological terms. Veterans of the earlier struggle, anxious to preserve their victories, played an especially active role in the process. But was opposition to conscription always remembered in terms of a demo­c ratic victory and an expression of anti-militarist spirit? Were the memories of radical veterans accepted by younger generations? And did an anti-conscription legend survive beyond Vietnam? Here the evidence is much more ambiguous.

The Eclipse of a Legend Labor propagandists of the interwar years were not convinced that the anticonscription struggle had been fully understood. Jauncey reported in 1935 that ‘scarcely an article’ had appeared on this ‘important phase of Australian 45

Eric Fry, ‘Conscription Then and Now: Today’s Anti-conscription Compared with the Conscription Struggles of 1916–17’, Australian Left Review 1, no. 3 (1966): 34–9. 46 Holloway, The Australian Victory, 2. 47 Walker, How to Defeat Conscription, 22. 48 Fry, ‘Conscription Then and Now’: 34. 49 Ibid.: 39. 50 This reflects the notion of traditions as ‘imagined’ or ‘invented’ means of providing continuity with the past, as famously explored in: Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

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history’,51 and Blackburn agreed that ‘the true story’ of these events ‘ha[d] been overlaid by a deposit of imagination’, even among ‘many who took part in the struggle’.52 Writing from Britain in 1937, Australian author Jack Lindsay decided not to seek a publisher for a novel he had completed on the struggle – The Blood Vote – believing the chances of publication slim.53 Half a decade later, Senator Don Cameron mourned the ‘lamentable mis­ understanding of conscription’ among a ‘number of middle-aged and elderly individuals’, worsened by the outright ‘lack of this knowledge’ among ‘many young people … It is a tremendous pity that so many young people in the Labor Movement will not bother to think about conscription.’54 A widespread ignorance of a topic serves often as a writer’s tactical justification for a taking up the pen, so perhaps these lamentations – pre­ ludes to sometimes substantial commentaries on the conscription struggle – should not be accepted too readily. But if they aspired to correct ignorance and wayward imaginations, then the major contributions of Jauncey and Blackburn were not obvious carriers of a ‘legend’ or ‘myth’ of democratic antimilitarism, in any case. Blackburn’s pamphlet noted the initial popularity of conscription, and the Labor’s Party overwhelming commitment to Allied victory.55 Sharing these emphases,56 Jauncey also outlined the func­ tioning of an earlier system of compulsory military training, and the initial ‘disappointment’ among anti-conscriptionists at the decision to hold a referendum.57 He further suggested that ‘anti-conscriptionists’ had been too strongly inclined to ‘overlook the great service’ of many (defecting) members of the Labor Party, and was at pains to acknowledge that ‘the anticonscription vote had not been a peace or anti-war vote’, still less a ‘vote for Socialism’.58 If a ‘legend’ of a democratic and anti-militarist victory flowered in these years – as has often been claimed 59 – then it was not strongly evident in the major texts favoured by the movement itself. 51 Jauncey, The Story of Conscription, ix. 52 Blackburn, The Conscription Referendum of 1916, 3. 53 The novel was later published in 1985, and Lindsay’s ‘Author’s Note’ recalls his earlier beliefs: Jack Lindsay, The Blood Vote (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1985), vi. 54 Don Cameron, ‘Victorian Labor Rebuffs Conscription’, Labor Call, 10 December 1942. 55 Blackburn, The Conscription Referendum, 7, 8. 56 E.g., on Allied victory: Jauncey, The Story of Conscription, 105. 57 Ibid., 32, 157 58 Ibid., 142, 257 59 The strongest claim is Inglis, ‘The Anzac Tradition’: 35–6. Revealingly, he references neither Jauncey nor Blackburn.

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Perhaps already weaker than has been widely understood, the status of the ‘legend’ was further undermined by the actions of the Curtin Government. Though an admired veteran of the struggle in WWI, as Prime Minister of Australia in WWII Curtin succeeded in changing Labor policy, so that conscripts might be deployed outside the national borders, including the seas and islands of the South-west Pacific. His arguments were based on strategic reasoning: ‘If an area was vital to Australian strategy, then that area must be the one to which Australia must give full weight.’ His tone was respectful: he did not propose to ‘alter’ party policy on conscription, he said, so much as seek an ‘interpretation’. His pained resolution was obvious: He had never thought he would have to ask the Australian worker to do the things he asked him to do, but he had, and the task had come to him as Prime Minister, and what he had to do he had to do for the future.60

The conservative press complimented the Labor leader for ‘the tearing out of a very old and firmly fastened plank’ from the ‘Labour platform’.61 Conservative politicians expressed admiration.62 Internal critics noted that Curtin had not made ‘a positive declaration that conscription for overseas military service is a hateful thing’.63 Supporters in the labour movement claimed an underlying consistency in the priority Curtin had granted to ‘the defence of Australia’ in both 1916–17 and in 1942–43.64 The argument probably convinced many. But it also relegated anti-conscription to an un­ accustomed subordinate place. For the true believers of the anti-conscriptionist cause, Curtin’s change of heart remained inexplicable.65 But whether damned or honoured, his new policy forever complicated both the status of anti-conscription principles and the meaning of the struggles of World War One. Upon his death in 1945, Curtin became a martyr to the movement, and his shared government with Ben Chifley a monument to the possibility of national defence and 60 61 62 63 64 65

Australian Labor Party, Official Report of Proceedings of Special Commonwealth Conferences Held at Melbourne on Monday November 16, 1942 and Monday, January 4, 1943 (Carlton, 1943), 32, 34. ‘Mr. Curtin’s Courage’, Argus, 19 November 1942. E.g., Earle Page, House of Representatives, 10 February 1943. Frank Brennan, House of Representatives, 10 December 1942. ‘Labor Puts Australia First’, Westralian Worker, 24 December 1942. For example, A.A. Calwell, Be Just and Fear Not (Hawthorn: Lloyd O’Neil, 1972), 46. See also John McKellar, Maurice Blackburn and the Struggle for Freedom (Melbourne: The Anti-Conscription Campaign, 1945), n.p.

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postwar reconstruction. Upraised as servant of cause and nation, succeeded by years of division and defeat, Curtin and Chifley emerged as symbols of Labor’s greatest and most golden age.66 The legend of their successful governments came to supersede an earlier preoccupation with the victories over conscription. And when the issue of military compulsion re-entered public debate, in the middle years of the nineteen-sixties, opponents of the policy were forced to grapple with a complicated lineage that now included accommodation as well as resistance. As a conservative government deployed conscripts to Vietnam, its sup­ porters pointed to the ‘fallacy’ that Labor’s ‘traditional role’ had ‘always been anti-conscription’.67 In a Ministerial statement, March 1966, Gordon Freeth argued that the ‘concept of an outer screen for defence’ had been ‘adopted by Australia’s wartime Labour Government’.68 In question time, Prime Minister Harold Holt noted that the Labor Party had ‘introduced conscription in May, 1943, without referendum’. 69 Addressing Liberal supporters, Holt even lauded Curtin’s ‘courage’, seeking to draw an unflattering comparison between Labor leaders of the present and the past.70 Senator Vince Gair of the Democratic Labor Party was more forthright still in his appropriation of Curtin’s legacy: … when Mr. Calwell says that the Australian Labor Party is an anticonscriptionist party he is not correct. We know that John Curtin saw the necessity of conscription in Australia … As a result we still have our liberty, our freedom and our democracy.71

In this context, committed opponents of conscription found it necessary to explain the events of World War Two; a simple adversion to a tradition expressed at the beginning of the century was no longer likely to persuade. Some Laborites now conceded that Curtin ‘broke away’ from the ‘traditions 66

67 68 69 70 71

Their political careers have been the subject of telemovies (Curtin) and television series (True Believers), as well as notable biographies: e.g., David Day, John Curtin: a life (Pymble, NSW: HarperCollins, 1999); David Day, Chifley (Pymble, NSW: HarperCollins, 2001). The habit of a later leader, Dr. Evatt, to invoke Chifley, is noted and criticised in: ‘Menzies, Evatt Both Use Chifley As Example’, Sun, 10 May 1954. The phrases ‘light on the hill’ and ‘true believers’, both associated with this period, remain central to Labor discourse. Geoffrey Giles, House of Representatives, 16 March 1966. Gordon Freeth, House of Representatives, 24 March 1966. ‘No troop rise now’, SMH, 23 March 1966. David Solomon, ‘Ladies’ Day For the PM’, Canberra Times, 19 November 1966. Vincent Gair, Senate, 16 March 1966.

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of the past’.72 Others emphasised that Labor had agreed to the ‘imposition of conscription’ only ‘once’,73 or contrasted the ‘real danger’ of World War Two, with the diminished threats of the present.74 Others still argued that Curtin ‘did not go so far’ as the Conservatives,75 identifying differences of degree rather than principle. Gordon Bryant was even prepared to describe Labor’s traditional policies as blending voluntarism and compulsion: It was a Labour Government in 1943 which expanded the universal service system … Therefore, both compulsory service and voluntary service are part of our tradition.76

None of this weakened the Labor Party’s determined opposition to the con­ scription of young Australians for war in Vietnam. But it did disturb the idea of a Labor tradition on these matters, as it did the relative prominence of World War One in contemporary debates. The dynamics of the conscription conflict in the nineteen sixties displaced the heroic memories of the plebiscites of WWI in other ways. Robert Menzies had not served in the Great War, and Labor politicians therefore sometimes recalled his personal decision as a means of undermining the later determination of the Liberal Party to press the young into battle.77 More radical figures mocked ‘Mr. Menzies’ Most Famous Speech’ – in which he explained his actions to parliament – in scurrilous leaflets.78 In the process of these interventions, the events of earlier decades were somewhat personalised. The collective struggle over the plebiscites was thereby partly obscured by a preoccupation with Menzies himself. The formal arrangements around conscription in the Vietnam era also differed greatly from the era of Hughes and his antagonists. The form of conscription for Vietnam was organised as a ballot (‘run like a bloody lottery’),79 and Australian citizens were never granted the opportunity to 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

Patrick Kennelly, Senate, 17 November 1964. ‘Calwell attacks Vietnam policy’, Canberra Times, 16 March 1966. James Cavanagh, Senate, 23 March 1966. Tom Uren, House of Representatives, 17 November 1964. Gordon Bryant, House of Representatives, 22 March 1966. See for example: Jim Cairns, House of Representatives, 17 November 1964; Tom Uren, House of Representatives, 17 November 1964; James Cope, House of Representatives, 17 March 1966. ‘Mr. Menzies’ Most Famous Speech’, authorized by J.B. Henderson, Brisbane. Available at: http://www.reasoninrevolt.net.au/objects/pdf/a000686.pdf Tony Morphett, ‘Objector’, in Conscription in Australia, eds. Roy Forward and Bob Reece (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1968), 280.

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vote directly on the matter. Opponents therefore faced a quite different context from that which prevailed half a century earlier; consequently, they often drew greater inspiration from the draft-dodgers of America than they did from the participants in Australian referendum campaigns, 1916–17.80 A broader interest in American and European radicalism defined this era of political dissent,81 in any case, so that Australia’s radical victories held only a waning appeal. The personal style of Calwell, who led the Labor Party until 1967, may also have contributed to the relative eclipse of the legend. Though he bravely campaigned against conscription, and, as we have seen, sometimes referenced the victories of WWI, Calwell also attacked ‘so-called militant’ students, damned ‘sexual indulgence and depravity’, and warned that ‘Participatory democracy’ would lead ‘inevitably towards totalitarianism’.82 An ageing figure uncomfortable with television, the self-conscious bearer of earlier Labor traditions therefore failed to find very much common ground with the younger generation of radicals. In consequence, his emphasis on the relevance of WWI, and the import of its key happenings, was also unlikely to ignite the youthful carriers of political revolt. Indeed, if there was as ‘legend’ of anti-conscription by the later sixties, then it clearly lacked the romance, and the resonance, of a Che Guevara, May ’68, or Ho Chi Minh. Wide public acceptance of conscription83 also helped block out the achievements of earlier years. As its critics sadly admitted, conscription was ‘integrated into national life’ over the middle sixties without the ‘bitterness’ and ‘enmity’ evident in World War One. 84 For Roy Forward and Bob Reece, writing in 1968, this was a ‘remarkable fact’, especially given the ‘long-established belief that voluntarism and a distaste for authority form a real part of Australia’s cultural make-up’.85 Humphrey McQueen, then a budding activist of the New Left, noted a similar dissonance between the 80

See: Chris Guyatt, ‘The Anti-Conscription Movement, 1964–1966’, in Conscription in Australia, 187. 81 An argument developed in: Sean Scalmer, Dissent Event: protest, the media, and the political gimmick in Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2002), esp. Ch. 1, Ch. 4. 82 Calwell, Be Just and Fear Not, 246–48. 83 Murray Goot and Rodney Tiffen, ‘Public Opinion and the Politics of the Polls’, in Australia’s Vietnam, ed. Peter King (Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1983) 142. For surveys of students, see Murray Goot, ‘Beyond the Generation Gap’, in Australian Politics: A Second Reader, ed. Henry Mayer (Melbourne: F.W. Cheshire, 1969), 171–72. 84 Geoff Hasler, ‘Public conscience and war’, SMH, 7 December 1968. 85 Roy Forward Bob Reece, ‘Introduction’, in Conscription in Australia, xi.

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expectations of a radical-nationalist myth and the realities of contemporary public life: Something had gone wrong: if the Australian working-class was what [radical historian, Robin] Gollan and others had said it was there should have been overwhelming support for Calwell’s anti-imperialist and anti-conscriptionist policies. But there wasn’t.86

Already, an earlier generation of left-wing Australians had begun to fear that the ‘legend’ of a radical working class was inconsistent with the appar­ ent affluence and quiescence of postwar society. 87 But the sense of doubt was often stronger among the young turks, 88 and the achievements of the anti-conscription struggle therefore less likely to impress. Rather than a myth of democratic anti-militarism, the events of the WWI home front were increasingly recalled in less heroic and more complicated terms. Even celebratory histories of the Labor Party would henceforth grant the episode only selective and ambiguous attention.89

Division: The Dominant Interpretation of the Conscription Campaign In place of a ‘legend’ of democratic anti-militarism, the dominant view of the conscription campaigns came to emphasise disunity, bitterness, and division. This was an interpretation in fact already evident in earlier decades, though perhaps at first overshadowed by the more celebratory view.90 It remains the prevailing perspective on the episode, for historians as much as for partisans and for school students.

86 87 88 89

90

Humphrey McQueen, cited in: Sadia Schneider, ‘The Australian New Left: A Study in Historiography and Social Change’, Honours Thesis, History, University of Melbourne, 2013, 19. A position registered and criticised in: Sean Scalmer, ‘Imagining Class: intellectuals in the 1950s and insights into the present’, Overland, no. 146 (1997): 21–25. For example, Terry Irving and Baiba Berzins, ‘History and the New Left: Beyond Radicalism’, in: Richard Gordon, ed., The Australian New Left: critical essays and strategy (Melbourne: William Heinemann, 1970), 66–94. This is true, for example of two recent works: John Faulkner and Stuart Macintyre, eds., True Believers: the story of the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party (St. Leonards, Allen and Unwin, 2001) and Nick Dyrenfurth and Frank Bongiorno, A Little History of the Australian Labor Party (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2011). The possibility that major political events may be remembered in alternative ways is registered in: Tacke, ‘1848. Memory and Oblivion in Europe’, 14.

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Those who supported Hughes’ plans were devastated by their defeat. Some immediately bewailed the plebiscites as a ‘triumph of ignorance’91 and a victory for ‘transparent demagoguism’ and ‘sectional prejudices’.92 Round Table, for example, mourned the ‘cross-currents’ of ‘personal interests and prejudices’ across the campaigns,93 lamented the ‘degrading’ prevalence of ‘grotesque canards’,94 and fearfully anticipated the prospect of ‘sordid strife’ in the years to come.95 Historians closely affiliated with Australia’s mobilisation shared in these apprehensions, transmitting them into a generation of influential scholar­ ship. In Anzac to Amiens, Australia’s official war historian, C.E.W. Bean, reaffirmed that ‘Australia unquestionably stood in danger’, grieved that the conscription campaign became ‘the most violent struggle in Australian political history’, and claimed, quite incredibly, that ‘there was no issue of principle between most of the protagonists’ involved.96 Ernest Scott, Professor of History at the University of Melbourne, likewise discerned a ‘vehement fury’, an unequalled ‘bitterness’, ‘abuse’, ‘misrepresentation’, and ‘anger’, and a suppression of individual argument by the powerful thund­er­ storms of angry crowds.97 The referendum, adjudged the Professor, was a ‘dubious method’ of determining governmental action in a ‘grave national emergency’.98 It had created a ‘bitter partisan issue’ out of a situation that ‘should have been kept beyond the range of ordinary party strife’.99 Alarm at apparent division is perhaps unsurprising among those who embraced the war as a grand unifier – a baptism of fire for an infant nation.100 91 92 93

Lone Hand, cited in: Sammut, ‘‘Busting’’ the Anti-Consciption Legend’: 176. Brisbane Courier, 8 November 1916, cited in: Ibid. ‘The Second Rejection of Conscription’, Round Table (1918) reprinted in Australian Commentaries: Select Articles from the Round Table 1911–1942, ed. L.L. Robson, (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1975), 79. 94 ‘Conscription Referendum 1916’, in Australian Commentaries, 53. 95 Ibid., 61. 96 C.E.W. Bean, Anzac to Amiens: A Shorter History of the Australian Fighting Services in the First World War, Fifth Edition (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1968), 292, 293, 294–5. 97 Ernest Scott, Australia During the War (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1936), 342, 415, 416–7. 98 Ibid., 360–1. 99 Ibid., 398. 100 Carolyn Holbrook notes that the ‘shared ideological assumptions’ of Bean and Scott made it difficult for them to account for the history of the home front, and the rejection of conscription (though she also notes important differences between them). See: Holbrook, Anzac, 40, 47, 50–1, 54–5.

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But conservative disquiet at national disunity was of course matched by the labour movement’s equal alarm at the fracturing of Party solidarity. The defection of Hughes and fellow-conscriptionists established, sadly, the dif­ ficulties labour supporters faced in their quest to subordinate politicians to the will of the membership.101 It robbed the cause of its most energetic and articulate spokesmen, and helped to keep Labor from federal power for nearly a generation.102 The labour movement had already developed a distinctive mythology around renegades and rats.103 Now, the perfidy of the conscriptionists and the danger of another split became an abiding theme of Party memory. Conscription and disunity were henceforth closely linked in Party propa­ ganda and internal debate. Much more than a legend of democratic antimilitarism, the topic of conscription became more closely identified with a legend of betrayal, reversal, and deceit. As one careful observer of his Labor opponents noted on the floor of the Senate, 1943, ‘Conscription has always been regarded by the Australian Labour party as a monster raising its ugly head, and with its poisonous tongue disturbing the peace and calm of Labour unity’.104 When the Party contemplated conscription in World War Two, the prospect of disunity preoccupied both supporters and opponents of the policy. Writing against Curtin’s proposals, Dinny Lovegrove of the Victorian Trades Hall cautioned that Labor could not ‘be again torn by the bitterness and disunity which characterised the conscription issue during the last war’.105 Senator Don Cameron feared ‘another split in the Movement’.106 Sol Rosevear damned ‘Mr. Curtin’s move’ as ‘one of the gravest blows that could have been struck at the solidarity of the Labour Party’.107 In a caucus debate, Arthur Calwell accused Curtin of flirting with defection: ‘the way you’re going, you’ll finish up on the other side’.108 The Worker recalled the conscription conflict, not so much as a triumph 101 See: V.G. Childe, How Labour Governs: A Study of Workers’ Representation (Parkville: Melbourne University Press, 1964). 102 Half of the first Federal Labor Caucus eventually left the Party. See: John Iremonger, ‘Rats’, in True Believers, eds. Faulker and Macintyre, 268. 103 Jacqueline Dickenson, Renegades and Rats: Betrayal and the Remaking of Radical Organisations in Britain and Australia (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2006). 104 George McLeay, Senate, 17 February 1943. 105 D. Lovegrove, ‘Against Conscription’, Labor Call, 26 November 1942. 106 Don Cameron, ‘Federal Conference’s Decision’, Labor Call, 14 January 1943. 107 ‘Mr Calwell Explains His Actions’, Argus, 15 December 1942. 108 Calwell, Be Just and Fear Not, 55.

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of democratic anti-militarism, but much more as a parable of division and defeat: When the People of Australia rejected Conscription in 1916 and 1919 [sic], there were serious disaffections from the Labor Movement, and its political opponents reaped a tremendous benefit from those dis­ affections. The political opponents of Labor to-day are looking for a repetition of those conditions now, and since the present Federal Labor Government assumed office they have concentrated upon that objective.109

But this was a fear by no means limited to the most irreconcilable enemies of wartime conscription. Though strongly supporting Curtin, Treasurer J.B. Chifley joined the parliamentary debate in February 1943, advising Labor members to recall the history of past labour splits, and the lessons of solidarity: … honourable members opposite saw in this proposal an opportunity to split the Labour party. Nothing could give them greater gratification. They would be glad to see, as happened when the right honourable mem­ ber for North Sydney (Mr. Hughes) put his conscription proposals to the test of a referendum, the people who largely represent the workers of this country split into ribbons through an internal dispute over this problem.110

It was a concern carried into the second half of the twentieth century. When a conservative government introduced conscription in the middle sixties, some outspoken Labor members accused it of attempting to ‘split the Labour Party’.111 Others returned to the conflicts of World War One, reviewing Hughes’ actions under the title ‘Conscription issue led to downfall’.112 Doubt­less, the subsequent history of the labour movement helped to magnify these dangers. Splitting in the Depression and again in the Cold War, Labor’s supporters were unsurprisingly preoccupied with the maintenance of collective unity. The repeated defections from the Party reminded members of the dangers of division, keeping the memory of the conscription split 109 ‘A Most Momentous Issue’, Worker, 7 December 1942. 110 J.B. Chifley, House of Representatives, 4 February 1943. 111 Jim Cairns, House of Representatives, 17 November 1964. See also: K.S. Inglis, ‘The Great Conscription Row’, Canberra Times, 21 November 1964. 112 K.E. Beazley, ‘Conscription issue led to downfall’, Canberra Times, 9 February 1966.

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alive as an exemplar of betrayal and a warning of its costs.113 In this way, the events of the 1916 and 1917 came increasingly to be recalled in the form of a movement parable. And though springing from quite distinctive sources, the recollection of the conscription conflicts in these terms converged with the earlier, conservative interpretation, in a common emphasis on danger and division. The memories of Australian Catholics offered reinforcement. Though Catholics were at first by no means united on the question of conscription,114 Prime Minister Hughes explicitly identified Melbourne’s Archbishop, Daniel Mannix, as the ‘leader of the Government’s opponents’ and a preacher of ‘sedition’.115 Anti-Catholic propagandists supported his arguments, and a new Victorian Protestant Federation was formed in September 1917.116 The Catholic Church’s leaders were repulsed by what one Bishop called a ‘campaign of calumny’ and another an attempt to ride a ‘wave of sectar­ ianism’;117 the place of Catholics within the Australian community seemed to come into question.118 A substantial body of Church history, biography and even theatre amplified the theme in later years.119 In the eyes of many Catholics, conscription thereby came to imply an era of painful accusation and fractured loyalties, what one scholar called ‘the most bitter sectarian animosity in Australia’s history’.120 The association between conscription and division was bolstered by broader developments in political and intellectual life. The liberation move­ments of the sixties mobilised as a challenge to the myth of social equality, drawing attention to oppressions organised around race, gender, 113 Note the contribution of party elder, John Faulkner, to a work he co-edited: John Faulkner, ‘Splits: consequences and lessons’, in True Believers, eds. Faulker and Macintyre, 203–18. 114 Kildea, Tearing the Fabric, 138. 115 Hughes cited in: Cyril Bryan, Archbishop Mannix: Champion of Australian Democracy (Melbourne: Advocate Press, 1918), 165. 116 Ibid., 117, 167. 117 J.V. Duhig and Daniel Mannix, cited in Ibid., 3, 193. 118 Patrick O’Farrell, The Catholic Church and Community: An Australian History (Kensington: New South Wales University Press, 1985), 334. 119 See, among others: E.J. Brady, Doctor Mannix: Archbishop of Melbourne (Melbourne: The Library of National Biography, 1934); Frank Murphy, Daniel Mannix: Archbishop of Melbourne (Melbourne: The Advocate Press, 1948); Niall Brennan, Dr Mannix (Adelaide: Rigby, 1964); B.A. Santamaria, Daniel Mannix: The Quality of Leadership (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1984); Barry Oakley, The Feet of Daniel Mannix (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1975). 120 Michael Hogan, The Sectarian Strand: Religion in Australian History (Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1987), 179.

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and sexuality.121 The intellectuals who supported and sometimes led these campaigns challenged the notion of a unified identity and a shared culture. And the historians influenced by the ferment carried this sen­ sitivity to difference and dissent into the exploration of Australia’s past.122 In con­sequence, students of the home front emphasised division and disunity (A Divided Society, to quote one representative title),123 noting the independent and sometimes shocking activism of women,124 disclosing the power of anti-war movements,125 and revealing the ‘social protest’ en­ compassed in long-running strikes.126 Fictional works of earlier years had already identified the presence of divisions on the home front.127 Increasingly, accounts of conscription narrowed ever more around the concept of social polarisation. The historical view is now relatively consensual: the campaigns ‘strength­ ened’ an ‘undercurrent of ugliness and dangerous intolerance’,128 opened up ‘seemingly unbridgeable divisions’,129 ‘precipitated a revival of sectarian­ ism’,130 ‘unleashed destructive passions’,131 and provoked ‘the most divisive and bitter political debate that Australia had seen’.132 Public exhibitions 121 See, for example, Scalmer, Dissent Events, especially Chapter 3. 122 A point also made in: Frank Bongiorno, Raelene Frances and Bruce Scates, ‘Labour and Anzac: An Introduction’, Labour History, no. 106 (2014): 6. 123 Marilyn Lake, A Divided Society: Tasmania during World War I (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1975). 124 Judith Smart, ‘The Right to Speak and the Right to be Heard: The Popular Disruption of Conscriptionist Meetings in Melbourne, 1916’, Australian Historical Studies, no. 92 (1989): 203–19; Joy Damousi, ‘Socialist Women and Gendered Space: Anti-conscription and Anti-war Campaigns 1914–18’, in Gender and War: Australians at War in the Twentieth Century, eds. Joy Damousi and Marilyn Lake (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 254–73. 125 Ann-Mari Jordens, ‘Anti-war Organisations in a Society at War, 1914–1918’, Journal of Australian Studies, no. 26 (1990): 78–93. 126 For example, Lucy Taksa, ‘‘Defence not Defiance’: Social Protest and the NSW General Strike of 1917’, Labour History, no. 60 (1991): 16–31. 127 For example, Judah Waten, The Unbending (Melbourne: Australasian Book Society, 1954). This work focuses on the experiences of a migrant family from Russia and dramatises the violence and harassment they faced. 128 Robson, The First A.I.F., 98. 129 Michael McKernan, Victoria at War 1914–1918 (Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2014), 168. 130 Jean Beaumont, ‘The politics of a divided society’, in: Australia’s War, 1914–18, ed. Joan Beaumont (St. Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1995), 56. 131 Stephen Holt, ‘The Durability of Dualism’, Canberra Times, 24 November 1999. 132 David Day, Claiming a Continent: A New History of Australia (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1996), 243.

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empha­sise that the conscription debate ‘divided the nation’.133 School textbooks and teaching materials especially stress how the plebiscites ‘split the nation’134 and ‘heightened the divisions in Australian society’,135 through the manipulation of ‘guilt, fear and sorrow’.136 Curriculum design docu­ ments depict the ‘bitter debates’ over conscription as the culmination of ‘deep divisions in Australia’.137 A recent Victorian Certification of Education examination even invited students to reflect on such ‘deep divisions’.138 The contemporary recollection of conscription, of course, is contained within the broader revival of Anzac commemoration and enthusiasm, and this has further influenced the extent and the form of conscription mem­ ory. Overwhelmingly, the embrace of Anzac over recent decades has emphasised pride in military valour and national self-consciousness in a common admiration for bloody sacrifice.139 The dynamics of the home front have been marginalised by these developments,140 and the conscription conflict itself granted increasingly rare attention. Australian governments have spent more than $500m on the centenary of the Great War alone.141 These acts of commemoration, like those that have gone before, have largely overlooked those who opposed the outbreak or the waging of the conflict.142 133 ‘Billy Hughes at War’, exhibition at the Museum of Australian Democracy, available at: http://billyhughest.oph.gov.au/conscription_debate 134 F.B. Smith, The Conscription Plebiscites in Australia, 1916–17, Fifth edition (North Melbourne: History Teachers Association of Victoria, 1981), 22. 135 Robert Darlington, Vicki Greer and John Hospodaryk, Historyzone 2: Stage 5: Australia Since 1901 (Port Melbourne: Harcourt Education, 2004), 59. 136 Jeremy Sinclair, World War I (Collingwood: History Teachers’ Association of Victoria, 2013), 42. 137 ‘Unit 4: Australian History’, Area of Study 1, History: Victorian Certificate of Education Study Design (Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority, 2013), 88. 138 2012 Assessment Report, Australian History GA 3: Examination (Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority, 2013), 5. 139 One expression of this rise is in battlefield tourism. See: Bruce Scates, Return to Gallipoli: Walking the Battlefields of the Great War (Melbourne and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). For a critical exploration of the Anzac revival, see: Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds (with Mark McKenna and Joy Damousi), What’s Wrong with Anzac? The Militarisation of Australian History (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2010). But cf. Geoffrey Blainey, ‘We Weren’t that Dumb’, The Australian, 7 April 2010. 140 Bongiorno et al., ‘Labour and Anzac’, 16 note that the themes of home front history have been neglected since the 1980s. 141 http://honesthistory.net.au/wp/budget-2015-honest-history-factsheet-centenaryspending-551-8-million/ 142 Robert Nelson, ‘We should honour those who refused to go to war’, Age, 11 November 2015.

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The process is perhaps most strongly evident in Australian schools, where many students passionately identify with Australia’s wartime experiences, finding ‘patriotism’ and ‘pride’ in an appreciation of the battles of WWI.143 Of the five books specially produced by the Commonwealth Department of Veterans’ Affairs to aid school education about World War One, only one addresses the home front.144 Of this book’s ten specified ‘student learning outcomes’, only one references conscription, and even this as part of a wider consideration of enlistment: ‘Explain reasons for enlistment as well as arguments for and against conscription.’145 This does not mean that the conscription conflict has been forgotten. But it has been partly submerged, as compared with the inter-war years of labour-movement celebration.146 Perhaps just as importantly, the wide­spread association of the Anzac story with national unity has also shaped the context in which ‘anti-conscription’ has been recalled. When the struggle over conscription has re-entered the public sphere, it has mostly been as part of the broader debate about war and nationalism that Anzac evokes. The revival of the Anzac legend has been matched by a vigorous at­ tempt to counter the belief that a unified nation was born on the shores of Gallipoli:147 ‘War did not unite, but rather divided society’, Henry Reynolds has written.148 Anxious to identify persistent conflicts within Australia, par­ticipants in these debates have therefore turned to the con­scrip­tion cam­paigns as demonstrable proofs. The campaigns have been recalled in this way in many contributions to the debate over Anzac: authoritative

143 Anna Clark, History’s Children: History Wars in the Classroom (Sydney: NewSouth, 2008), 45. 144 See the Department of Veterans’ Affairs website: http://www.dva.gov.au/commems_ oawg/commemorations/education/Pages/education%20resources.aspx 145 Home Front (Canberra: Department of Veterans’ Affairs, 2012), 3. 146 This reflects Chris McConville’s recent emphasis on the ‘iron grasp of Anzac remembrance’, and the failure of ‘counter-memory’ to combat it. See: Chris McConville, ‘Anzac: Memory and Forgetting in Local Landscapes’, in Fighting Against War: Peace Activism in the Twentieth Century, eds. Phillip Deery and Julie Kimber (Melbourne: Leftbank Press and the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, 2015), 314–15. 147 For a conservative critique of this challenge to Anzac, see: Mervyn F. Bendle, Anzac and its Enemies: The History War on Australia’s National Identity (Sydney: Quadrant Books, 2015). Interestingly, Bendle does not consider the ‘conscription’ conflicts in this book. 148 Henry Reynolds, ‘Are nations really made in war?’, in Lake and Reynolds, What’s Wrong with Anzac?, 26.

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historical scholarship,149 newspaper commentaries,150 public exhibitions,151 and even journalist sallies (‘Don’t mention the conscription debates!’ said one mocking interviewer to Liberal education spokesman, and later Minister, Christopher Pyne: ‘You want us to understand ANZAC and part of our culture, except for the divisive bits.’)152 Interventions of these kinds demonstrate that the revival of Anzac mem­ ories has not completely excluded other memories of WWI; rather, it has served, in part, as a stimulant for alternative versions of the past.153 Un­ doubtedly, these recollections of conscription have helped to rebalance public under­stand­ings of the impact of World War One on Australian society. Nonetheless, in their strong emphasis on disunity, they have also confirmed a narrowing conception of what the conscription conflicts involved.

Conclusion The legend of the anti-conscription struggle as signifying democratic victory and anti-militarist principle has not retained currency. It has only episodically been advanced within the labour movement, in any case, and has increasingly been complicated by later events, and by changes in movement culture and public life. More completely than any labour legend of democratic anti-militarism, an alternative association of conscription and division now dominates historical accounts. Postulated initially by con­servative supporters of Hughes’ proposals, it has also been asserted by Laborites anxious to preserve solidarity, Catholics pained by sectarian conflict, and by New Leftists devoted to the rediscovery of a conflictual past. The revival of Anzac since the 1980s has also provoked a greater emphasis on the divisive aspects of the conscription conflict, even as it has diverted attention from the home front as a whole. In consequence, an alarmingly narrow understanding of the campaigns is now recalled. It is carried in 149 Ibid., 26–7. 150 David Elias with Therese Ambrose, ‘Conscription a policy that has torn the nation’, Age, 25 September 1999; Julie Kimber, ‘Jingoistic bluster encouraged our boys to go to war’, Age, 5 September 2014. 151 Note the intent of curator of ‘Billy Hughes at War’ exhibition to ‘convey how strong the feelings were over conscription, and the terrible conditions of the time’, as reported in: John Hamilton, ‘Cast your vote on Little Digger’s War’, Herald Sun, 25 February 2008. 152 See: http://www.pyneonline.com.au/media/transcripts/abc-891-48 153 This reflects the notion of ‘multidirectional’ rather than ‘competitive’ memory, devel­ oped in: Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), especially, 3–17.

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educational materials, respected scholarship, and popular journalism. It is shared by Left and Right.154 The passing of a legend of anti-conscription is not to be mourned. It would be quite wrong to claim a national tradition of anti-militarism or to interpret the episode as an unalloyed democratic victory, unmarked by pressing questions about the practice of self-rule. The heightening of social divisions should not be overlooked. As a complicated historical event, the great conscription conflict resists simple celebration. Nonetheless, the increasingly exclusive emphasis on disunity carries its own undoubted limits. The conscription campaign was an important episode in the history of Australian democracy. Treating it exclusively as the occasion of unfortunate divisions obscures this wider significance. The opportunity for electors to decide such an important issue in wartime is strikingly unusual.155 If the campaign expressed and even promoted divisions in Australian life, then the extent of violence was also sharply contained; rare episodes of physical conflict were quickly subdued.156 If arguments on both sides were often personalised and manipulative, then this seems to conform with the history of vote-winning, rather than to signal an unusual departure from the norms of rational-critical debate.157 If the Labor Party endured a catastrophic break, then its members also asserted their collective will on those it considered unreliable leaders. If conscriptionist authorities deployed censorship and repressed opponents,158 then anti-conscriptionists – including women and radical socialists – found creative ways to reach the citizenry.159 154 In addition to figures on the Left, see conservative columnist Gerard Henderson, ‘Not even so much as a beg pardon’, Sydney Morning Herald, 24 April 1995; Gerard Henderson, ‘Historically, action taken by our politicians and military forces in Great War stands up well’, Australian, 2 August 2014. 155 A point made in: Robin Archer, ‘Stopping War and Stopping Conscription: Australia’s Response to World War I in Comparative Perspective’, Labour History, no. 106 (2014): 43–68. Archer also seeks to explain why the Australian case differed. 156 Robson, The First A.I.F.,114. See also Frank Bongiorno’s chapter in this volume. 157 On the longevity of less elevated appeals: Ian Warden, ‘Oh for a spot of good oldfashioned campaign dirt!’, Sydney Morning Herald, 18 May 1974. See also Murray Goot and Sean Scalmer, ‘Party Leaders, the Media, and Political Persuasion: The Campaigns of Evatt and Menzies on the Referendum to Protect Australia from Communism’, Australian Historical Studies 44 no. 1 (2013): 71–88. 158 Stuart Macintyre, The Oxford History of Australia, Volume 4, 1901–1942: The Succeeding Age (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1986), 165. 159 On the unprecedented extent of campaign leaflets, see: Ernest Scott, Australia During the War (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1936), 424. On large crowds for open-air meetings, see: McKernan, Victoria at War, 164. On the activity of women, see: Jauncey, The Story of Conscription, 202–3.

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Ham-fisted repression may even have influenced many undecided voters to turn against the Government.160 The results of the referendum should not be obscured by the bitter pas­ sages of the struggle. The leaders of the ‘No’ case understood their victory as a ‘severe blow’ to sectarianism,161 and a vindication of ‘mutual assistance’ across religious lines.162 By the votes of the Australian people, the limits of state power were established. By the respect granted to popular opinion, the primacy of the democratic principle was confirmed. The dominant memory of the conscription conflict therefore conceals many dimensions of the episode. It also distorts its relationship to Australia’s democratic history. Disunity and conflict lie at the centre of democratic politics,163 and so their presence in political campaigns need not be inter­preted as unexpected or unfortunate. Division and radical contest can often help to advance reform.164 If the conscription conflicts were divisive, then this does not mean that they did not also help to define the scope, the concerns, and the practices of Australian democracy. Whether divisive or not, the event should be remembered as a significant moment in a national history of selfrule. It is in transcending the familiar polarities of ‘legend’ and ‘lamentation’ that historians may regain a fuller conception of the events of 1916–17, and of their possible significance. And as earlier Australians have long understood, the historical memory of these episodes will have important implications for the practice of contemporary politics, too.

Acknowledgements Special thanks to Liam Byrne for research assistance and comments, and to workshop participants for their comments.

160 A suggestion regarding the anti-conscriptionist vote ventured in: Smith, The Conscription Plebiscites, 12; Russell Ward, Australia (Sydney: Ure Smith, 1967), 134; Blackburn, The Conscription Referendum, 15. 161 Archbishop Mannix, cited in: Bryan, Archbishop Mannix, 163. 162 Archbishop Mannix, cited in: Brady, Doctor Mannix, 87–8. 163 On the import of conflict to politics: Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London and New York: Verso, 1993). 164 One explanation of this process is the so-called ‘radical flank effect’. Its relevance to Australian in WWI is noted in: Verity Burgmann, ‘Syndicalist and Socialist Anti-Militarism 1911–1918: How the Radical Flank Helped Defeat Conscription’, in Fighting Against War, eds. Deery and Kimber, 57–9.

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NO T E S ON C ON T R I BU T OR S Robin Archer is Director of the postgraduate program in Political Sociology at the London School of Economics and Emeritus Fellow in Politics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He is the author of Economic Democracy (Oxford, 1995) and Why Is There No Labor Party in the United States? (Princeton, 2008). Frank Bongiorno is Associate Professor of History at the Australian National University. He is the author of The People’s Party: Victorian Labor and the Radical Tradition, 1875–1914 (Melbourne, 1996), The Sex Lives of Australians: A History, (Melbourne, 2012) and The Eighties (Melbourne, 2015). John Connor is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of New South Wales, Canberra. He is the author of The Australian Frontier Wars (Sydney, 2005) and Anzac and Empire: George Foster Pearce and the Foundations of Australian Defence (Cambridge, 2011). Joy Damousi is Professor of History at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia (Cambridge, 1999), Freud in the Antipodes (Sydney, 2005) and Colonial Voices: A Cultural History of English in Australia 1840–1940 (Cambridge, 2010). Murray Goot is Emeritus Professor of Politics at Macquarie University. He has written widely on elections, referendums and public opinion, and is the co-author of Divided Nation? Indigenous Affairs and the Imagined Public (Melbourne, 2007). Ross McKibbin is Emeritus Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford. He is the author of The Ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain 1880–1950 (Oxford, 1990) Classes and Cultures: England, 1918-1951 (Oxford, 1998), Classes and Cultures: England 1918-1951 (Oxford, 1998) and Parties and People: England 1914–51 (Oxford, 2010). Douglas Newton was formerly Associate Professor of European History at the University of Western Sydney. He is the author of British Labour, European Socialism and the Struggle for Peace (Oxford, 1985), British Policy and the Weimar Republic (Oxford, 1997) and The Darkest Days (London, 2014). Sean Scalmer is Associate Professor of History at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of Dissent Events: Protest, the Media, and the Political Gimmick in Australia (Sydney, 2002) and Gandhi in the West: The Mahatma and the Rise of Radical Protest (Cambridge, 2011). – 211 –

I N DE X academics, role in conscription debates 93–4, 99–108 Adams, R.J.Q. 152 Addison, Christopher 33 agriculture 179 Alden, Percy 31 All Australia Trade Union Congress on Conscription (AATUCC) 41–3, 49, 50, 63 Allen, Harry 99 Allen, James 155, 156, 158 Amalgamated Society of Engineers 173 American Civil Liberties Union 51 American Civil War 17, 161 Amery, Leo 21 Amiens, Battle of 153 anarcho-syndicalism 70–1 Andrews, Eric 141, 180 Anstey, Frank 74, 78 Anti-Conscription and Anti-Militarist League 70 Anti-Conscription Celebration League 191–2 Anti-Conscription Jubilee Committee 193 Anti-Conscription League 39, 70 anti-conscription legend 188–90 anti-conscription meetings, attacked by soldiers 49, 50–1, 75, 76 anti-imperialism 23–4 anti-Labor electorates, outcomes of referendums 125–9 anti-militarism 14, 15–16, 22–4, 26 anti-war agitation 72 Anzac commemoration 206–7 Anzac legend 188, 207–8 Archer, Robin 8–9, 158 Asquith Coalition government 14, 36, 152–3, 173 Asquith, Herbert 18, 20, 25, 26, 30, 35, 152–3, 170 Asquith Liberal government 35 Aubers Ridge 151 Australian Defence Act 1910 (Cwlth) 172 Australian Freedom League 43, 71–2, 78 Australian Imperial Force (AIF) falling recruitment 165 size and composition 156 Australian nationalism 185 Australian Natives Association 45 Australian Peace Alliance 38n2, 50, 60, 68, 72, 78 Australian Trade Union Congress, Manifesto 80

Australian Women’s National League(AWNL) 92, 101, 106 Australian Worker (AW) 38n2, 79, 105 Australian Workers Union (AWU) 38n2, 71, 74, 79 Baker, Newton D. 159–60 Barker, Tom 89 Barrett, John 96 Barton, Edmund 142 Battle of Amiens 153 Battle of Passchendale 164, 165 Battle of the Somme 157 Bean, C.E.W. 201 Beaumont, Joan 75, 144 Belgium, German atrocities 151 Bentley, Michael 26 Berry, Richard 105 Bill of Rights (1689) 15 Birdwood, General Sir William 158 Blackburn, Doris 80 Blackburn, Maurice 77, 125, 138–9, 139, 143, 145–6, 191–2, 195 The Blood Vote (Dempsey; attrib. Winspear) 84, 103, 130, 193 Boer War 19–20, 22–3, 25, 34, 170 Boilermakers Union 71, 174 Bolton, Geoffrey 120 Bongiorno, Frank 9 Boote, Henry 38n2, 44, 47–8, 50–1, 79, 86 Borden, Sir Robert 54, 161–2, 163–4, 165–6, 167 boy consciption 96 Boyce Gibson, William 105 Bradlaugh, Charles 79 Brailsford, H. N. 29 Brennan, Frank 43, 81 Brennan, Niall 137, 138 Bright, John 15–16, 17, 23 Britain advocacy for compulsory military service 27–9 attitude towards the war 170 civil conscription 172–4, 179 conscription as democratic 174–5 consequences of conscription 176–7 denunciation of conscription 15–16 ‘Derby scheme’ 30, 170, 171n6 equivocations regarding conscription 16–18 eugenic argument for conscription 171 ‘fairness’ argument for conscription 170–1

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Index historic anti-conscriptionism 170 impossibility of a referendum 175 introduction of conscription 5, 14, 36, 40, 41, 53, 148, 151–3 labour movement attitude to conscription 172–4, 176 manpower policy 172–3 movement for conscription 170–2 navalism 27–8 permeation of militarism 18–21 principle of voluntary service 15 public attitude towards conscription 175–6, 177 Radicalism, New Liberalism and Liberal Imperialism 21–5 state socialism 174 ‘trade card scheme’ 173 wartime Coalition government 151, 152–3 British Army need for new recruits 152, 153 size and composition 151, 153 British colonies, conscription schemes 149–50 British Communist Party 5 Brookfield, Percy 76, 80 Bruce, Stanley Melbourne 109 Brunner, Sir John 23 Bryant, Gordon 198 Bryce, James 130 Bryce Report 151 Burgmann, Verity 71 Buxton, Sydney, 1st Earl Buxton 150, 156 Byrne, Sir Joseph 166 Calwell, Arthur 192, 193, 197, 199, 202 Cambridge University 93, 98 Cameron, Don 195, 202 Campbell-Bannerman, Sir Henry 19, 25 Canada anti-conscription riots in Quebec 167 division between Quebec and Anglophone provinces 162, 163 introduction of conscription 5, 148, 162–4 policy shift on exemptions from conscription 167 size and composition of military forces 161 as source of wartime supplies for Britain 162–3 ‘Canadian commonsense’ argument 54 Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF), size and composition 161, 163 Caporetto 153, 165 Cardwell, Edward 16 Catholic Press 137, 190 Catholic social thought 88 Catholic vote 86–7, 136–40, 182, 204 Catts, James 78, 87

Cavendish, Victor, Duke of Devonshire 163, 167 Ceadel, Martin 16, 18 censorship and surveillance 49–51, 81, 143 Chamberlain, Joseph 21, 23 Chifley, Ben 196–7, 203 Childe, V. Gordon 180 Churchill, Winston 22, 28, 30, 34 civic humanism 80 civil conscription 172–3, 179 civil liberties, infringements of 49–51 Clark, Manning 134, 144, 189 Clark, Rev. Andrew 170 Clarke, Frank 137 clergy, condemnation of conscription 78 Clynes, J. R. 176n25 Cobden, Richard 15, 17, 23, 27–8 Coefficients Club 20–1, 27 Cole, G.D.H. 174 commemoration of conscription referendum victories 190–3 compulsory military training as ‘boy conscription’ 96 extension of 57 Labor pledge to abolish 191 in pre-war Australia 27, 32, 96 in pre-war New Zealand 27 support for 74 compulsory military service, prior to First World War 5 compulsory voting 113n10 comradeship in the trenches 3 Connor, John 10 conscientious objection 30, 57, 80, 153, 171–2, 177 conscript armies, in non-English-speaking combatants in Great war 148 conscription debate in Australia commemoration of referendum victories 190–3 consequences 183–5 extent of conflict 2–3, 75–7 as factional struggle in labour movement 55–9 impact 6 key themes 7 legacy 7–8, 200–8 significance 209–10 uniqueness 3–4, 37, 178 see also first conscription campaign; second conscription campaign conscription of wealth 61–5, 74, 157, 181 Conservative Party (UK) 19, 23, 28, 177 continental despotism conscription as defining characteristic 14, 16, 53–4 and universal military service 4

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T he Conscription Conflict and the Great War Cook, Tim 162 Crimean War 15–16, 17 Crouch, Richard 89 Crowley, Frank 117 Curtin government 196–7 Curtin, John 77, 186, 192, 196–7, 198, 202–3 Daily Standard offices 76 Daly, Jean 83 Damousi, Joy 9–10, 83 Dardanelles campaign 151 Dawkins, Clinton 27, 34 Deakin, Alfred 96, 107 Deakin government 96 Deakinite liberals 46 Debs, Eugene 51 Defence Bill 1910 57 defence industry, Australia compared to Britain 179 Defence of the Realm Acts 35 democracy Australia’s responsibility as ‘most advanced’ democracy 101–2 and free speech 49 saved by anti-conscriptionists 189 threat posed by conscription 9, 29, 35–6, 41, 42, 43, 81, 82, 90, 102 Dempsey, E. J. 84 Dent, S. Hubert 160 deportation of ‘aliens’ 108 Derby scheme 30, 170, 171n6 Dreyfus Affair 4 drought 157 Duke, Henry 166 Dyrenfurth, Nick 61, 62, 73 East African campaign, Kenyan conscripts 149 Easter uprising, Dublin 1916 87, 136, 182 ecological fallacy 124, 145 egalitarianism 185 Eggleston, Frederick 109 eugenic argument for conscription 171 ex-serviceman’s organisations, political conservatism 185 exemptions from conscription 72, 161 Fabians 174 ‘fairness’ argument for conscription 170–1 federal elections 1914 result 157 turnout during wartime 114 first conscription campaign attack on wording of proposal 143 keeping Australia white and free 86–8 medical case for conscription 97 organisations, individuals and arguments 73–7

tyranny and freedom 80–3 women’s opposition 82–5 Yes campaign 94–5, 97 first conscription referendum (1916) expectation of its passing 145 Liberal voters’ role in defeat of 127–8 margin of victory for No vote 158 outcomes by State 117–19, 121 political impact 142–3 proposal put to voters 111, 143, 144 reasons for holding 37–8, 142 split of vote along party lines 125–9 voter turnout 113 votes of service personnel 111–12, 131 women’s vote 131–2 Fisher, Andrew on internationalism 52 opposition to conscription 39 private correspondence 44 resignation 39 on support for Britain 106 Fisher government, introduction of compulsory military training 27 Fitzgerald, J. D. 47 Fitzhardinge, Laurie 137 Fitzpatrick, Brian 144, 193 Flavelle, James 162 Forward, Roy 199 Foster, Alf 85 France, anti-conscription campaign 4 Free Religious Fellowship 78 free speech 49–50, 83 Free Trade 15, 17 Freeden, Michael 25 freedom obligations attached to 102 rhetoric of 69–70, 74, 80–3, 88, 90, 190 Freeman’s Journal 137 Freeth, Gordon 197 French Army 153 French Communist Party 5 French, Field Marshal Sir John 166 French West African colonies 150 Fry, Eric 193, 194 Gair, Vince 197 Gallipoli campaign 73, 166 Gardiner, Albert 44, 57 gender, differences in voter turnout 115, 116–17 German Army 151, 153, 166 German Navy 151, 159 German victory, purported impact of 102–3 Gibson, P. M. 139 Gladstone, William Ewart 17–18, 19, 23 Goldstein, Vida 50, 70, 75, 78, 83 Goot, Murray 10

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Index Gould, Ashley 155, 156 Grant, Mary 83 Grattan, Hartley 144 Great War see World War One Gregory, Adrian 151 Grey, Edward 18, 20, 25, 26, 29, 34 Griffith, Ellis 32 Haldane, Richard 18, 26, 28 Hammond, J. L. 22, 24 Harcourt, Lewis 22 Hardie, Keir 175 Hawke Labor government 192 Henderson, Arthur 32, 152, 173, 176, 179 Higgins J, H. B. 50 Higgs, William Guy 44, 57, 184n61 Hill, John 174 Hirst, Francis 22, 24, 29 Hirst, John 55, 59, 65, 86, 137, 141 Hobhouse, L. T. 22, 24, 29, 33 Hobson, J. A. 22, 24, 33 Holloway, E. J. 2, 38n2, 43, 50, 55, 75, 77, 130, 193, 194 Holman, William 73 Holt, Harold 197 Holt, Richard 32 Horne, Donald 142 Housewives’ Association 101 Hudson, Wayne 136 Hughes Labor Government (1915–16) Cabinet members’ stance on conscription 56–8 decision to hold referendum 40, 75, 158, 183 no-confidence motion against Hughes 158 options for introducing conscription 157 Hughes Nationalist Government decision to hold another referendum 165 formation 158 majority in House and Senate 165 Hughes, Sam 162 Hughes, William Morris anti-Hughes sentiment 89 appointment as Prime Minister 39 arguments for Yes campaign 94–6 as Australian Napoleon 53–4 behaviour and rhetorical style 90, 95 confrontation with Ryan 89 on defeat of referendums 95–6, 178 on extent of conscription conflict 2 formation of Nationalist Party 158 leadership style 82 on liberal principles and compulsory service 44–5 militarism 51–2 negotiation of coalition government 158 radicalism 184 referendum results in his electorate 125–6

sectarian tactics 140 on the ‘selfish’ vote 133, 178 support for compulsory military training 5 support for conscription 37, 40, 59–60, 75, 94–6, 157–8 walk-out following no-confidence motion 158 on War Census Bill 39 ‘Hundred Days’ offensive 153 Imperial Conferences 155 Imperial Munitions Board 162 Imperial Round Table 92 individualism, and socialism 48 industrial conscription 45–8, 80, 81, 83 industrial relations, Australia compared to Britain 179–80 Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) (Wobblies) 70–1, 76–7, 95 Inglis, Ken 131, 136, 146, 189 Inter-State Trade Union Congress 74–5, 78 International Woman Suffrage Alliance 109 internationalism 52, 94 internment of ‘aliens’ 108 Ireland exemption from conscription 148, 151, 166–8, 181–2 protest against possible conscription 167–8, 182 Irish Catholic vote 86–7, 136–40, 182 Irish republicanism 87 Irish Trades Union Congress 167 Italian Army 153, 165 Jamaica, compulsory military service 149 Japan, as future military threat 86–7, 96, 183 Jauncey, Leslie C. 69, 72, 83, 88, 92, 133, 192, 194, 195 Jaures, Jean 4, 52 Jeppe, Karen 109 John, Cecilia 83 Jones, Morgan 177 Keene, Jennifer 161 Kenya, conscription of African males 149–50 Kitchener, Herbert, 1st Earl Kitchener 152, 170 Kneebone, D. 191 Labor Call (LC) 38n2, 49, 101, 192 Labor electorates, outcomes of referendums 125–9, 179 Labor Party anti-militarism 191 campaign against conscription 72 commemoration of conscription victories 191–2

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T he Conscription Conflict and the Great War conscription policy 196–200, 202–3 consequences of conscription debate 183– 4, 191, 202 division and disunity 202–3 domination of state and federal politics in 1914 157, 181 expulsions 184 linked to Catholicism 184–5 on outcome of conscription referendums 190 ‘pledge’ 181 splits 180, 181, 203–4 Labor Volunteer Army 71, 76, 80 Labor-in-Politics Convention (1916) 74 labour market, Australia compared to Britain 179 labour movement attempts block referendum proposal 60–1 attitudes to war 157, 180, 183 authority in Britain 173–4 and conscription of wealth 61–5 fear of industrial conscription 45–8 ‘legend’ or ‘tradition’ around conscription 190–200 liberal arguments against conscription 40–5, 59–61, 65–6 opposition to first conscription campaign 74–7 struggle between industrial and political wings 55–6, 58–9, 157, 180–1 Labour Party (UK) 27, 65, 152, 170, 173, 174, 176, 177, 180–1, 186 Laby, Thomas 105 Laity, Paul 28 Lambert, Richard 33 Latham, Ella 108 Latham, John 108–9 Laurier, Sir Wilfrid 54, 163–4 Lavender, Bella 83 Law, Andrew Bonar 152 Lawson, Sir Wilfrid 21 League of Liberals Against Aggression and Militarism 23 League of Nations 109 League of Nations Assembly 109–10 League of Nations Union 94, 108–10 League of Women Voters of Victoria 101 Lederer, Emil 3 Leeper, Alexander 99, 100, 107–8, 110 Leigh, Andrew 118 Liberal Imperialism 18–21, 21–5, 26 liberal internationalism 94, 108, 108–10 Liberal League 20, 25 Liberal Party (UK) Edwardian radicalism 21, 22, 32–3, 41, 174 equivocations regarding conscription 16–18 impact of conscription 177, 186

Liberal Imperialism 18–21, 21–5, 26 New Liberalism 21–5, 31–2, 33, 34, 46, 48 opposition to conscription 15–16 liberal tradition affinity with New World 54 Britishness of 53–4 and labour movement opposition to conscription 41–5, 59–61, 65–6 liberal values, importance in conscription debates 7 Liberal voters, role in defeat of 1916 referendum 127–8 Liberal War Committee 34 liberalism Liberal Imperialism 18–21, 21–5, 26 liberal internationalism 94, 108–10 New Liberalism 21–5, 31–2, 33, 34, 46, 48 radical liberalism 21, 22, 32–3, 41, 174 see also liberal tradition liberation movements of 1960s 204–5 Lindsay, Jack 195 Lloyd George, David anti-militarism 23 on compulsory training 28 consideration of conscription in Ireland 166–7 on Liberal principles 35 New Liberalism 22, 25 as prime minister 153 reformist budgets 24 support for civil conscription 172 support for military conscription 30, 33, 34, 152 Lloyd George government 153, 173–4 Long, Sir Walter 150, 167 Loos 151 Lovegrove, Dnny 202 loyalism dilemma 53–4 Ludendorff offensive 173 Lusitania, sinking of 151 ‘Lusitania riots’ 152 Lyceum Club, Melbourne 109 MacCallum Scott, Alexander 23, 31, 34 MacDonald, James Ramsey 51, 176n25, 177 Macdonald, Murray 33 McGibbon, Ian 154 McGirr, Greg 183 McInerny, J. 106 McKenna, Reginald 177 McKernan, Michael 137, 182 McKibbin, Ross 11 Mackinnon, Donald 184 McQueen, Humphrey 199–200 Mahon, General Sir Bryan 166 Mahon, Hugh 57, 58 Maltese migrants 86

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Index Mann, Tom 180 Mannix, Archbishop Daniel 77, 87–8, 89, 90, 136–7, 138–40, 164–5, 182, 204 Marquet, Claude 54, 60, 84, 103, 130 Massey, William 154, 155, 158 Masson, David 108 Masterman, Charles 22, 24 mateship 3 Matthews, Mrs 106 Mauger, Samuel 77 medical profession, support for conscription 97–8 Melbourne Cricket Ground, Yes supporters rally 107 memorials to conscription referendum outcome 190–1 Menzies, Robert 109, 186, 198 Methodists 140 Military Service Act 1916 (UK) 166, 171–2 Military Service Act 1917 (Canada) 167 Military Service Amendment Bill 1918 (UK) 167 Military Service Bill 1916 (UK) 30–3 Military Service Bill 1917 (Canada) 164 Military Voters Act 1917 (Canada) 164 Mill, John Stuart 16–17, 49 Millar, T. J. 43 Miller, Monty 76 Miller, Thomas J. 78 Moloney, Parker 78 Money, Sir Leo Chiozza 31 Monteno, Percy 32–3 Moore, Edith Harrison 100–1, 105–6 Moore, William Harrison 100–1, 103–5, 107, 108, 109–10 Moran, Herbert 139 Morley, John 18, 19, 22 Mouquet Farm 157 Munitions of War Act (UK) 35, 83, 173 Munro-Ferguson, Sir Ronald 165 Murdoch, Keith 131 Nasson, Bill 150 National Council of Women (NCW) 92, 101, 105–6, 109 national identity 188 National Reform Union (NRU) 23 National Service League (NSL) 27, 28, 29, 34, 45 national unity, and Anzac legend 207–8 Nationalist Party 158 Nationalist voters, role in defeat of 1917 referendum 128–9 navalism 27–8 Navy League 28 Neuvre Chapelle 151 New Liberalism 21–5, 31–2, 33, 34, 46, 48

New Zealand introduction of conscription 5, 148, 153–6 Maori conscription 155, 156 Military Service Boards 155 National Efficiency Board 155 Territorial Force 153 New Zealand Expeditionary Force (NZEF) 153 Newfoundland, introduction of conscription 148, 166 Newfoundland Regiment 166 Newman, John 100 Newton, Douglas 8 No Conscription Fellowship 38n2, 63, 72 non-intervention, principle of 15–16 Noone, Val 87 NSW Branch of British Medical Association 97–8 NSW Labor Party 74 NSW Political Labor League (PLL) 41, 43, 44, 62 O’Farrell, Patrick 136, 139 Oliver, Bobbie 122, 140 O’Malley, King 56, 57–8, 126 Ormond College 99 Osborne, William 105 Our Cause 105 Oxford University 93, 98, 99 Page, Earle 186 Palmerston, 3rd Viscount 16, 17 Pankhurst, Adela 70, 75, 78, 83, 89 Parnell, Charles 57 Passchendale, Battle of 164, 165 Payne, Henry 105 peace movement, in nineteenth-century Britain 15–16 Pearce, Sir George 49, 55–6, 130, 158, 165 Petty-Fitzmaurice, Henry, 5th Marquess of Lansdowne 171 Poirier, Philip P. 152 poison gas 151 police clashes with demonstrators 76 raids on radical and labour newspaper offices 49, 50, 81 political freedom 103 politicians, reasons for opposition to conscription 55–9 Pozières 157 Presbyterians 140–1 Primrose, Archibald, Earl of Rosebery 19, 20 Pringle, William 35–6 Progressive movement 154, 155, 161 Protestant Churches 92, 182 Protestant vote 136, 139, 140–1 Pyne, Christopher 208

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T he Conscription Conflict and the Great War Quakers 71–2 Quebec City riots 167 Queen Victoria Hospital for Women 101 racism 86, 98, 182–3, 186 ‘radical flank effect’ 210n164 radical liberalism 21, 22, 32–3, 41, 174 Radical Newcastle Programme 19 radical-nationalist myth 200 Rae, Arthur 42, 62, 63 Raemaekers, Louis 105 Rainbow Circle 31 Reece, Bob 199 referendums conditions for passage 112n4 first law of Australian referendums 142 see also first conscription referendum (1916); results of conscription referendums; second conscription referendum (1917) Reid, Robert, 1st Earl Loreburn 22 republicanism 80 results of conscription referendums Catholic vote 136–40 division of votes on party lines 125–9 ecological reasoning behind explanations 123–5, 145 Protestant vote 136, 140–1 rural voters 133–5 State voting patterns 117–23 turnout by gender by State 1906–1919 115 voter turnout for conscription referendums 113–17, 142 Withers modelling of results 123–5 women’s vote 130–2 Returned Soldiers No-Conscription League 89 Reynolds, Henry 207 Richard, Henry 18 Riley, Fred J. 50, 68–9, 70, 72 Rivett, Albert 78 Robertson, John M. 31, 33, 119–20, 122, 139 Robson, Lloyd 113, 136, 144 Roosevelt, Theodore 160 Rosebery Liberal government (UK) 19 Rosevear, Sol 202 Ross, R. S. (Bob) 50, 72, 81 Round Table 100, 111, 118, 126, 133, 138, 201 Royal Canadian Regiment 161 Runciman, Walter 29, 33 rural voters, voting patterns 133–5 Russell, Edward John 57 Russian Army 153 Ryan, T. J. 77, 89, 90, 181 Sammut, Jeremy 188–9 Samuel, Herbert 22, 24, 28, 31, 33 Scally, Robert 21

Scalmer, Sean 11 Scharf, Eduard 107–8 scholars, role in conscription debates 93–4, 99–108 Scott, C. P. 23, 33 Scott, Ernest 88, 110, 142, 201 Second Battle of Ypres 151 second conscription campaign attack on wording of proposal 143–4 bitterness of 164–5 Hughes versus Mannix 140 for limited conscription 165 medical case for conscription 97–8 No campaign 88–90 Yes campaign 97–8, 101–8 second conscription referendum (1917) margin of victory for No vote 164 Nationalist voters’ role 128–9 outcomes by State 118–19, 121 proposal put to voters 112, 143–4 voter turnout 113 votes of service personnel 112, 132 women’s vote 132 sectarianism 184–5, 186, 204 Seely, John 28 Selective Service Act 1917 (US) 160, 161 semi-syndicalism 181 Senate, in Hughes Liberal government 142–3, 157, 158 service personnel distinguished from those who hadn’t served 185 eligibility to vote 116 vote of overseas forces 131 voter turnout 116, 132 voting results 111–12, 120 Shaw, A.G.L. 139 ‘shirker vote’ 178 Simon, Sir John 31, 35, 153, 170, 171 Sinclaire, Frederick 77 Sinn Fein 96, 167 Skelton, Oscar D. 163 slavery, rhetoric of 29, 80, 81–2, 83, 88 Smart, Judith 106 Smith, Barry 141 Snowden, Philip 83 social division, as consequence of conscription debate 185, 186, 190, 200–8 social policy, New Liberalist stance 21–2 Social Radicals 25 socialism 47–8, 174 Socialist 38n2 Socialist Party 71 socialists, attitudes towards conscription 4–5 soldiers attacks on anti-conscription meetings 49, 50–1, 75, 76, 81–2, 85

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Index propaganda value of their opinion 89 see also service personnel Somme, Battle of 157 South Africa 5n12, 148, 155–6 South African Native Labour Corps 150 South Australia, ‘German’ vote 122–3 South Wales Miners 175 spiritual freedom 103 Stanton, C. B. 170, 175 State elections 157 state socialism 174 States’ results in referendums rural compared to metropolitan electorates 135 voting patterns 117–23 Stock, Jenny 122, 123 Strong, Charles 77–8 students, enlistment of 98–9 submarine warfare 151, 159 Sutton Turner, C. E. 68 Swiss militia system 4, 17 tarring and feathering 77 Territorial and Reserve Forces Act 1907 (UK) 33 Thorne, Will 170 Tillett, Ben 170, 175n21 ‘trade card scheme’ 173 Trades Hall building, Melbourne, memorial to referendum victories 190, 192 Trades Hall Council (THC) (Melbourne) 38n2, 49 Trades and Labour Council 71 Trades Union Anti-Conscription Committee 77 Trevelyan, Charles 29 Tudor, Frank 2, 57 Turner, Ian 55, 116, 122, 126, 130, 134 Turner, Naomi 138 tyranny, and freedom 80–3 U-Boat activity 151, 159 Union Army, conscription for Civil War 161 united front against conscription 73 United States declaration of war 159 exemptions from conscription 161 House Military Affairs Committee 160 interest in Australian conscription referendum 3–4, 160 introduction of conscription 148, 160–1 neutrality 159 Senate Military Affairs Committee 160 United States Army, size and composition 159, 160 universal military service advocacy in pre-war Britain 27–9 and continental despotism 4

Universal Service League (USL) 39, 40, 45, 73, 104, 108 University of Melbourne dismissal of German staff 107–8 role of academics in conscription debates 93–4, 99–108 student enlistment 98–9, 110 Victoria No vote in 1917 107 Yes vote in 1916 107 Victorian Labor Party 74 Victorian Political Labor Council (PLC) 38n2, 41, 42–3, 62, 63 Manifesto 82 Victorian Protestant Federation 204 Victorian Socialist Party (VSP) 38n2, 60, 72 Vietnam War, conscription 189, 193, 197, 198–9 Vimy Ridge 161 violence, during conscription campaigns 75–6, 88, 105, 106 voluntary service, principle of 14, 15, 18, 29, 30–3, 68–9 volunteer forces, in Great War 148 von Dechend, Walter 107–8 voter turnout by electorate 114–16 by gender 116–17 overall figures 113–14, 145–6 voting patterns Catholics and Protestants 136–41 complexity of 178–9 division along party lines 125–8 rural electorates 133–5 States 117–23 women 130–2 wage slavery 81 Walker, Bertha 77, 193, 194 Wallace, Elizabeth 85 Wallis, William 82, 86 War Census Bill (July 1915) 39, 41, 57 War Policy Committee (UK) 152 War Precautions Act (Cwlth) 37, 49, 60, 82, 157, 181 War Time Elections Act 1917 (Canada) 164 war-weariness 95 Ward, E. J. 186 Ward government (NZ), introduction of compulsory military training 27 Ward, Sir Joseph 27 wartime activism, memories of 188 Watson, Frederick 118–19, 130 Watt, William 98 Webb, Beatrice 21, 174 Webb, Jessie 100, 101, 103–4, 105, 108, 109, 110

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T he Conscription Conflict and the Great War Webb, Sidney 21, 174 Wedgwood, Josiah 22 West African colonies, conscription 150 Western Australia political culture 120 size of Yes vote 119–22 Western Front 153, 154, 159, 160, 166 White Australia 86–7, 90, 103, 107, 182–3 Wilde, Oscar 48 Wilson, General Sir Henry 27 Wilson, Havelock 170 Wilson, Woodrow 159, 160 Winspear, W. R. 84, 103, 130 Winstone, James 175 Withers, Glenn 123–5, 130, 134, 178 women appeal to role as mothers 83–5, 103–4 and the ‘blood vote’ 103–7 clashes over conscription 106 fear of militarism 83, 85 opposition to conscription 50, 70, 75–6, 78, 83–5, 95 soldiers’ verbal and physical abuse of 75–6, 85 support for conscription 95, 105–6 voter turnout by State in referendums 1906–1919 115 voter turnout for conscription referendums 116–17 voting patterns 130–2 Women’s Anti-Conscription Committee 83 Women’s Peace Army 70, 83, 84, 106 Women’s Political Association 70, 106 women’s rights campaigns 83 Woodruff, Harold 105 World War One conscript armies 148 impact on Australian society 208 school education about 207 volunteer forces 148 World War Two, introduction of conscription in Australia 192, 196, 202–3 Yres, Second Battle of 151 Zeppelin air raids 151 Zweig, Stefan 3

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